The Boys in the Boat
Daniel James Brown, 2013
The Depression-era sons of loggers and farmers row against Ivy League privilege—and Hitler's Berlin—in a story about endurance, class and what a boat can teach.
Daniel James Brown
Joe Rantz, the book's central figure, was in his nineties when Daniel James Brown interviewed him; Rantz died in 2007, six years before the book appeared.
Feels like hope, society and tenderness.
The fragments a child keeps when no one explains death.
But that wasn’t at all the way Joe remembered his early childhood. Instead he had a kaleidoscope of broken images, starting in the spring of 1918, when he was just about to turn four, with a memory of his mother standing by his side, in an overgrown field, coughing violently into a handkerchief, and the handkerchief turning bright red with blood. He remembered a doctor with a black leather bag, and the lingering smell of camphor in the house. He remembered sitting on a hard church pew swinging his legs while his mother lay in a box at the front of the church and would not get up. Books by Daniel James Brown
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