The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. By Daniel James Brown
This
book was a selection of the book club we belong to and I’m glad it
was. Otherwise, I probably would not have read this NYT best seller.
As you might expect, I learned a great deal about the sport of rowing
from it. And I learned about the impact of the Great Depression in a
micro way, on the lives of individuals. The millennial snowflakes of
today would do well to read it and discover what it was like to try
to go to college when your family had no money, the government wasn’t
giving out taxpayer money to students like candy (driving up the cost
of college), and you had to work summers and nights at grueling,
physical jobs to make it. It is beautiful written, and you cannot
help but be inspired by this story of poor American boys from the
west coast overcoming all odds to beat other American teams, and to
win the Olympics, despite the Nazi’s efforts to tilt the rowing
field in favor on the German and Italian teams and against the
Americans and British.
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