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A review by chewdigestbooks
The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory by Julie Checkoway
4.0
No idea why I choose to read this other than I was picturing the natural ravine behind one of my past houses and thinking how in the heck did they end up going to the Olympics swimming in something like that?
I was soon thrilled that I did read it. The timing, the 30' and 40's was obviously tumultuous for the world and Hawaii played such a huge and horrible part of us entering the war. The sociology issues of Japanese Hawaiians and the discrimination they faced, on the island, when they left the island and then Executive Order 9066, the internment of the Japanese. The labor issues that trapped cane workers to living in camps and having to swim in a gosh darn ditch rather than an actual pool. A coach, that didn't even know how to swim.
None of those issues kept them from trying to reach a goal that in the beginning, they didn't even know existed and the world war tried hard to keep them from achieving. It was a quest that some completed and some didn't, but what an amazing chunk of history. Even though I'm not into the Olympics or swimming, I was entranced.
My two complaints were that it was a bit long and there were times that I had trouble keeping track of all of the swimmers over the years that were involved. That last one is more my fault because the names were ones that I wasn't familiar with because I'm not into swimming or it's history, how the amateur and then Olympic team trials work, and some of the participants had Japanese names that I am not used to. I should have made a list, my bad.
I was soon thrilled that I did read it. The timing, the 30' and 40's was obviously tumultuous for the world and Hawaii played such a huge and horrible part of us entering the war. The sociology issues of Japanese Hawaiians and the discrimination they faced, on the island, when they left the island and then Executive Order 9066, the internment of the Japanese. The labor issues that trapped cane workers to living in camps and having to swim in a gosh darn ditch rather than an actual pool. A coach, that didn't even know how to swim.
None of those issues kept them from trying to reach a goal that in the beginning, they didn't even know existed and the world war tried hard to keep them from achieving. It was a quest that some completed and some didn't, but what an amazing chunk of history. Even though I'm not into the Olympics or swimming, I was entranced.
My two complaints were that it was a bit long and there were times that I had trouble keeping track of all of the swimmers over the years that were involved. That last one is more my fault because the names were ones that I wasn't familiar with because I'm not into swimming or it's history, how the amateur and then Olympic team trials work, and some of the participants had Japanese names that I am not used to. I should have made a list, my bad.