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[book post] The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown
This is an Oscarbait sports movie in book form. Which is not a bad thing; it knows what it is and executes on it well. I'm not the target audience, but my extended family absolutely is (ah, the life of a nerd raised among jocks), so I read this mostly to see what they've been raving about.
The story wisely centers itself on Joe Rantz, a man whose actual, 100% true life story reads like a dang Gary Stu fanfic. Shit that happens to Joe:
* is born
* his mom dies shortly after
* then his dad just straight-up ditches him? to go roving all over Canada?? like, i get being aggrieved, but "brb gonna go to Canada, good luck my five-year-old^ son" is... what
* (i mean an aunt and uncle end up taking care of him for that year, but, still)
* dad comes back with new wife
* new wife fucking hates the shit out of Joe
* even though Joe loves his younger stepsiblings so much, and tries so hard to make himself useful—maintains a whole fuckin vegetable patch just to try and supplement their food supply because they're poor as shit
* but like, she hates Joe so fucking much that when he's 12^, after some completely mundane minor misunderstanding with a sibling, she kicks him out of the house???
* and his dad just... goes along with it???
* like. they're in the middle of nowhere at a mining camp. Joe's like "but where am i supposed to go"
* and dad's just like "idk figure it out bro you are Old Enough To Be A Man Now"
* so he begs for some sad job in the mess hall for the miners, and like, sleeps on the floors of various houses of people who take pity on him
* but then his family decides to move someplace less rough-and-tumble (specifically Sequim, WA), and invites Joe to move with them
* welcome back 2 da fam Joe, maybe your existence isn't totally contingent on the whims of unreliable loved ones after all!
* (hahaha lolsob)
* and theeeen the Great Depression happens
* and his dad can't get work
* so he moves the family to Seattle, where there is work
* ...without Joe
* like. Joe gets home from school one day and. the whole house is packed. whole family is in the car. Joe's like "what's going on" and dad gets out to be like "oh well you're basically a man now, son, we figure you can get by on your own" all while the stepmom is staring daggers at him
* so for his last couple years of high school he's literally bootlegging and poaching salmon and just doin' whatever he can to scrape together an existence
* and he still manages to graduate at the top of his class & get into college because fuck the system
* and he makes it on the rowing team!!!
* ...and prompty gets berated for being poor & has to hide the fact that he barely has enough to eat, has to work extra jobs just to pay for tuition and shit, etc
^ ages approximate; not digging through the book again to be sure they're exact lol
Like, that's all before the meat of the rowing stuff starts. Someone cut our poor handsome talented smart over-six-foot-tall Disney prince a break!
Besides Rantz's story, there's a satisfying amount of detail about the sport of rowing itself, and in particular I loved the story of George Pocock, a humble boatbuilder from Britain who, due to some nice twists of fate, wound up getting a workshop right next to the University of Washington boathouse, and wound up quite literally transforming the sport by taking advantage of some of the properties of New World tree species & tinkering a lot. His boats became the new standard for racing shells for decades thereafter. I'm a sucker for stories about This One Weird Trick That Transformed The Metagame (like, please talk to me about the recent evolution of basketball to emphasize three-point shooting; I will murmur sweet nothings about Steph Curry all day), and that is totally here. So I guess I can add "please talk to me about the properties of wood types for various types of racing shells; I will murmur sweet nothings about cedar all day" to my list of Niche Things I'll Prattle On About.
And, while the elaborate Nazi propaganda campaign around the 1936 Olympics isn't quite the centerpiece of the story (such details mostly exist to emphasize that our heroes will inevitably Defeat Some Nazis, that most favorite Oscar film pastime), I did appreciate the author's repeated calling of attention to the general indifference & often very willful ignorance of Americans to the plight of German Jews during this time period. Like, for a particularly frustrating example: Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, started out saying, "hey, I understand everyone's concerns about the whole Nazi thing, but it wouldn't be fair to all these hard-working US athletes to be deprived of their chance at the Games." Then, uh, Brundage goes to tour Germany to investigate... and all these high-level German officials are the ones who take him everywhere... and they wine him and dine him and show him all these very beautiful buildings... and then his tenor changes to "wow all these Jews are so whiny, there's no problem in Germany at all, everything is totally 100% fine," and it's just... augh! Crazy how little it takes to bring that anti-semitism galloping to the surface!
(In general, the pattern of "powerful dude is just way too easily manipulated by dudes wining and dining him" is a pattern I've been grimly fascinated ever since that paper I wrote in college about Andrew Johnson Totally Deciding To Just Fucking Reverse Course On Actually Implementing Reconstruction, That Bastard Oh My God. Why is it that easy!!! Augh!!!)
But, like. Overall the book is mostly about the UW rowing team's successes and setbacks, and overall it's still Oscarbait, often laughably so—I mean, god, how can you not burst out laughing at syrupy overdone passages like this:
Bro We Are Literally Just Rowing Calm Down. Like, I'm charmed, but also: lol.
This is an Oscarbait sports movie in book form. Which is not a bad thing; it knows what it is and executes on it well. I'm not the target audience, but my extended family absolutely is (ah, the life of a nerd raised among jocks), so I read this mostly to see what they've been raving about.
The story wisely centers itself on Joe Rantz, a man whose actual, 100% true life story reads like a dang Gary Stu fanfic. Shit that happens to Joe:
* is born
* his mom dies shortly after
* then his dad just straight-up ditches him? to go roving all over Canada?? like, i get being aggrieved, but "brb gonna go to Canada, good luck my five-year-old^ son" is... what
* (i mean an aunt and uncle end up taking care of him for that year, but, still)
* dad comes back with new wife
* new wife fucking hates the shit out of Joe
* even though Joe loves his younger stepsiblings so much, and tries so hard to make himself useful—maintains a whole fuckin vegetable patch just to try and supplement their food supply because they're poor as shit
* but like, she hates Joe so fucking much that when he's 12^, after some completely mundane minor misunderstanding with a sibling, she kicks him out of the house???
* and his dad just... goes along with it???
* like. they're in the middle of nowhere at a mining camp. Joe's like "but where am i supposed to go"
* and dad's just like "idk figure it out bro you are Old Enough To Be A Man Now"
* so he begs for some sad job in the mess hall for the miners, and like, sleeps on the floors of various houses of people who take pity on him
* but then his family decides to move someplace less rough-and-tumble (specifically Sequim, WA), and invites Joe to move with them
* welcome back 2 da fam Joe, maybe your existence isn't totally contingent on the whims of unreliable loved ones after all!
* (hahaha lolsob)
* and theeeen the Great Depression happens
* and his dad can't get work
* so he moves the family to Seattle, where there is work
* ...without Joe
* like. Joe gets home from school one day and. the whole house is packed. whole family is in the car. Joe's like "what's going on" and dad gets out to be like "oh well you're basically a man now, son, we figure you can get by on your own" all while the stepmom is staring daggers at him
* so for his last couple years of high school he's literally bootlegging and poaching salmon and just doin' whatever he can to scrape together an existence
* and he still manages to graduate at the top of his class & get into college because fuck the system
* and he makes it on the rowing team!!!
* ...and prompty gets berated for being poor & has to hide the fact that he barely has enough to eat, has to work extra jobs just to pay for tuition and shit, etc
^ ages approximate; not digging through the book again to be sure they're exact lol
Like, that's all before the meat of the rowing stuff starts. Someone cut our poor handsome talented smart over-six-foot-tall Disney prince a break!
Besides Rantz's story, there's a satisfying amount of detail about the sport of rowing itself, and in particular I loved the story of George Pocock, a humble boatbuilder from Britain who, due to some nice twists of fate, wound up getting a workshop right next to the University of Washington boathouse, and wound up quite literally transforming the sport by taking advantage of some of the properties of New World tree species & tinkering a lot. His boats became the new standard for racing shells for decades thereafter. I'm a sucker for stories about This One Weird Trick That Transformed The Metagame (like, please talk to me about the recent evolution of basketball to emphasize three-point shooting; I will murmur sweet nothings about Steph Curry all day), and that is totally here. So I guess I can add "please talk to me about the properties of wood types for various types of racing shells; I will murmur sweet nothings about cedar all day" to my list of Niche Things I'll Prattle On About.
And, while the elaborate Nazi propaganda campaign around the 1936 Olympics isn't quite the centerpiece of the story (such details mostly exist to emphasize that our heroes will inevitably Defeat Some Nazis, that most favorite Oscar film pastime), I did appreciate the author's repeated calling of attention to the general indifference & often very willful ignorance of Americans to the plight of German Jews during this time period. Like, for a particularly frustrating example: Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, started out saying, "hey, I understand everyone's concerns about the whole Nazi thing, but it wouldn't be fair to all these hard-working US athletes to be deprived of their chance at the Games." Then, uh, Brundage goes to tour Germany to investigate... and all these high-level German officials are the ones who take him everywhere... and they wine him and dine him and show him all these very beautiful buildings... and then his tenor changes to "wow all these Jews are so whiny, there's no problem in Germany at all, everything is totally 100% fine," and it's just... augh! Crazy how little it takes to bring that anti-semitism galloping to the surface!
(In general, the pattern of "powerful dude is just way too easily manipulated by dudes wining and dining him" is a pattern I've been grimly fascinated ever since that paper I wrote in college about Andrew Johnson Totally Deciding To Just Fucking Reverse Course On Actually Implementing Reconstruction, That Bastard Oh My God. Why is it that easy!!! Augh!!!)
But, like. Overall the book is mostly about the UW rowing team's successes and setbacks, and overall it's still Oscarbait, often laughably so—I mean, god, how can you not burst out laughing at syrupy overdone passages like this:
In the last desperate few hundred meters of the race, in the searing pain and bewildering noise of that final furious sprint, there had come a singular moment when Joe realized with startling clarity that there was nothing more he could do to win the race, beyond what he was already doing. Except for one thing. He could finally abandon all doubt, trust absolutely without reservation that he and the boy in front of him and the boys behind him would all do precisely what they needed to do at precisely the instant they needed to do it. He had known in that instant that htere could be no hesitation, no shred of indecision. He had no choice but to throw himself into each stroke as if he were throwing himself off a cliff into a void, with unquestioned faith that the others would be there to save him from catching the whole weight of the shell on his blade. And he had done it. Over and over, forty-four times a minute, he had hurled himself blindly into his future, not just believing but know that the other boys would be there for him, all of them, moment by precious moment.
In the white-hot emotional furnace of those final meters at Grünau, Joe and the boys had finally forged the prize they had sought all season, the prize Joe had sought nearly all his life.
Bro We Are Literally Just Rowing Calm Down. Like, I'm charmed, but also: lol.