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Author : Daniel James Brown
Genre : Favorites, Historical Fiction
Another of my all-time favorites, and a must read. Elegantly written, Daniel James Brown’s book tells the story of the University of Washington’s 1936 eight-oar crew and their quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans in 1936.
The emotional heart of the story lies with one rower, Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not for glory, but to regain his shattered self-regard and to find a place he can call home. Drawing on the boys’ own diaries and journals, their photos and memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, The Boys in the Boat is an amazing story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate story of nine working-class boys from the American west who, in the depths of the Great Depression, showed the world what true grit really meant.
“To defeat an adversary who was your equal, maybe even your superior, it wasn’t necessarily enough just to give your all from start to finish. You had to master your opponent mentally. When the critical moment in a close race was upon you, you had to know something he did not—that down in your core you still had something in reserve, something you had not yet shown, something that once revealed would make him doubt himself, make him falter just when it counted most. Like so much in life, crew was partly about confidence, partly about knowing your heart.”
“Pocock told Joe that there were times when he seemed to think he was the only fellow in the boat, as if it was up to him to row the boat across the finish line all by himself. When a man rowed like that, he said, he was bound to attack the water rather than to work with it, and worse, he was bound not to let his crew help him row. . . . ‘Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you’ve ever imagined. Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars.’ Joe rowed that day as he had never been able to row before—as Pocock had told him to row: giving himself up to the crew’s effort entirely, rowing as if he were an extension of the man in front of him and the man behind him, following Hume’s stroke flawlessly, transmitting it back to Shorty behind him in one continuous flow of muscle and wood. It felt to Joe like a transformation, as if some kind of magic had come over him.”
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