The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (to give it its full title) is about the eight-man rowing team from the University of Washington that ultimately wins the Olympic medal. It follows the team, and one member in particular, from their initial tryouts through their narrow Olympic victory.
It's an exciting sports story, very well told. Brown is especially good at capturing atmosphere -- the sun glinting on the water, the crowds on the observation trains -- and at showing how a quality team came together piece by piece. He also shows how it's not a straight line from bad to good -- the team rows poorly at times. He gives a pretty good sense of rowing strategy too.
At the same time, it feels like Brown is working too hard to shape the story into a conventional sports melodrama, with the boys as underdogs representing the grit and determination of working class folks during the Depression, thwarting the plans of the evil Nazis and stirring the pride of our nation. The cliches run fast and thick in these sections, and the prose gets overheated. (They weren't really underdogs, you know.) He should have omitted all of the stuff about Germany and the Dust Bowl and stuck with Joe Rantz's story. There's plenty of drama there.
It's an exciting sports story, very well told. Brown is especially good at capturing atmosphere -- the sun glinting on the water, the crowds on the observation trains -- and at showing how a quality team came together piece by piece. He also shows how it's not a straight line from bad to good -- the team rows poorly at times. He gives a pretty good sense of rowing strategy too.
At the same time, it feels like Brown is working too hard to shape the story into a conventional sports melodrama, with the boys as underdogs representing the grit and determination of working class folks during the Depression, thwarting the plans of the evil Nazis and stirring the pride of our nation. The cliches run fast and thick in these sections, and the prose gets overheated. (They weren't really underdogs, you know.) He should have omitted all of the stuff about Germany and the Dust Bowl and stuck with Joe Rantz's story. There's plenty of drama there.
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