The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics / DanielJames Brown

The 1936 Olympics are probably best remembered by Americans for the singular accomplishment of Jesse Owens, his athletic prowess totally debunking the notion of Aryan supremacy at the “Nazi Olympics”. The Americans also bested the Germans in the eight-man crew competition, and The Boys in the Boat tells of their quest to win gold.

The backstory mainly focuses on Joe Rantz and his hard-luck upbringing as a de facto orphan in depression era Washington. Rowing was his ticket to education at the University of W, and his place on crew, though never assured and always fought for, was a path to betterment and an improved station in life. I was really taken by his hard-knocks life and marveled at all the hardships that he overcame.

The book also focuses on George Pocock, the Englishman whose skill at boat-building (known in crew as “shells”) set the standard in the 1930s. There are other characters such as Al Ulbrickson, the indomitable coach, who badgers and shepherds the boys to victory.

The description of the races, especially the final in Berlin, will keep the reader at the edge of his or her seat. This was an era when crew regattas captured the attention of not only the local populace who lined the waterfront on race days, but drew in the entire nation via wireless. The reader may experience the same excitement of the unfolding action with the stroke-by-stroke narrative communicated almost as if it were being transmitted by radio.

Click on this link for a Youtube clip of the rowing competition at the 1936 Olympics. At the end is some original footage of the race described in The Boys in the Boat (along with some recreated scenes from within the boat) .

Comments

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog