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. The story moves with steady, plainspoken warmth, carrying hope through hard times and making the rowing feel close and human.
Feels like hope and tenderness. About society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy Depression-era history, underdog sports stories, or memoirs built from a single person's memories. Be aware that it lingers on Joe's hard childhood and family loss, so some stretches carry real bleakness.
Why read it
It offers a grounded view of endurance and class through one crew's long effort, and shows how ordinary people can push back against privilege.
A page from the book
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. 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.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Boys in the Boat for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy Depression-era history, underdog sports stories, or memoirs built from a single person's memories. Be aware that it lingers on Joe's hard childhood and family loss, so some stretches carry real bleakness.
- What is The Boys in the Boat like?
- The story moves with steady, plainspoken warmth, carrying hope through hard times and making the rowing feel close and human. Feels like hope and tenderness. About society.
- What should I read after The Boys in the Boat?
- If you liked The Boys in the Boat, try Atomic Habits (James Clear), A Promised Land (Barack Obama) and The Greening of America (Charles A. Reich).
A taste of the feed
A few degrees at takeoff, a different city entirely.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
Atomic Habits · James Clear
The people who hold the world together are never the majority.
You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to “saints.” Wouldn’t it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority. More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So, let us be alert — alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
Man's Search for Meaning · Viktor E. Frankl
In the very shadow of the Capitol, freedom is put up for sale.
The building to which the yard was attached, was two stories high, fronting on one of the public streets of Washington. Its outside presented only the appearance of a quiet private residence. A stranger looking at it, would never have dreamed of its execrable uses. Strange as it may seem, within plain sight of this same house, looking down from its commanding height upon it, was the Capitol. The voices of patriotic representatives boasting of freedom and equality, and the rattling of the poor slave’s chains, almost commingled. A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!
Twelve Years a Slave · Solomon Northup
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