“The Boys in the Boat”

By: Daniel James Brown

Grade:  A-

About a third of the way through Daniel James Brown’s 2010 nonfiction book “The Boys in the Boat,” the reader learns of competitive rowing’s equivalent to a hole-in-one, a walk-off home run or a full-court shot. It’s called “swing.”

In a sport where every move has the potential to upset the entire boat, swing marks perfect synchronization between all eight oarsman, when each oar is hitting the water at exactly the same time. Romantically put by Brown, swing is when rowing “becomes a kind of perfect language.”

“The Boys in the Boat,” a homage to the gold medal-winning 1936 U.S. Olympic Rowing team, sees Brown explore the period’s issues of national identity, class differences and pre-war anxieties.As with his critically-acclaimed past two works, 2006’s “Under a Flaming Sky,” and 2009’s “The Indifferent Stars Above,” Brown’s latest offering finds him in full swing.

At first, “The Boys in the Boat” is Joe Rantz’s story. Brown meets Joe — a member of the 1936 squad from the University of Washington — in the prologue, with his 6 feet 3 inches tall frame slumped in a recliner, three months away from heart failure. After Brown realizes that Joe’s tale was “squirreled away from sight for too long,” he begins the well-developed coming-of-age tale that dominates the book’s first half.

Coming from working-class parents — much like the rest of the team — the good-natured Joe becomes the outsider in rowing culture. He’s especially poor, malnourished and can hardly pay for school, which doesn’t fit in with the “world of status and tradition, of refined tastes and unstated assumptions about social class, a world inhabited by the sons of bankers and lawyers and senators” that Brown describes as rowing.Brown gives a moving portrait of Depression-era poverty through Joe’s countless odd jobs, from janitoring the local YMCA to shuttling booze during Prohibition.

Later in the book, after several heart-pumping matches between the Washington boys and their rivals at Berkeley and Ivy League schools en route to Berlin, the story shifts to a startling, unnerving glimpse at pre-World War II Germany. By the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis had already begun their well-documented rise to power. However, they were not ready for conflict should the rest of the world confront them for their attacks on Jews or reoccupation of the Rhineland. They had to convince everyone they weren’t up to anything. It worked.

Under the public eye, Hitler successfully disguised Germany as “something resembling a vast movie set,” building the grand, technologically-advanced Olympic Stadium, while removing anti-Semitic newspapers from newsstands and sweeping Gypsies off the streets and into death camps. Although outsiders were oblivious to this activity, Brown repeatedly foreshadows the oncoming war with chilling, often abrupt anecdotes, from a cheery “Heil Hitler!” to the American squad, to the boos and jeers the team receives at the opening ceremony.

Aside from Joe’s arc and the look at early Nazi Germany, Brown propels readers through the nearly 400-page-long narrative with vividly-drawn, curious characters. There’s Al Ulbrickson, the “Ahab-like” head coach, who chews cigarettes when he’s nervous and is notoriously tight-lipped around the Seattle press. Legendary boatbuilder George Pocock hovers around nearly every scene featuring the team, mumbling Shakespeare quotes in the same breath as racing advice. It’s Brown’s thorough and well-incorporated reporting that does the job here — he begins each chapter with wise words from Pocock, and often shares commentary from Ulbrickson’s terse, blunty-written journal.

Between the character moments and races, however, Brown often breaks up the narrative with awkward, textbook-style lessons on rowing technicalities. These moments stall the reader instead of adding to the Olympic team’s lore, especially when he goes on about particulars like the type of wood the shells are made of. You’ll finish the book thinking you could grab an oar and win a gold medal yourself.

Still, Brown skillfully portrays Joe and his fellow rowers as representative of the search for American identity following the bloody World War I, relevant amidst today’s post-war struggles. Through his repeated commentary on the team’s dynamic and collective growth, Brown documents America’s shift away the countercultural individualism of the 1920s, optimistically looking ahead to the patriotism that would come to characterize World War II-era America.

Brown makes this allegory powerfully clear by the time the rowers pack up for Berlin. He writes that —besides their newfound shared values — “the things that held them together — trust in each other, mutual respect, humility, fair play, watching out for one another — those were also part of what America meant to them.”