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islewild 's review for:
This is one of those books that was ALMOST really good. Brown is a great sports writer. The account of the final race was particularly well done and he did a great job of depicting the victory as a culminating moment in the life of Joe Rantz. If I weren't reading this for book club, there is a good chance I would have abandoned it pretty early on though. Joe's life was pretty compelling but the author kind of meandered into too many details about people who played supporting roles in this drama.
Ultimately I think this book would be much more interesting if it were 50-100 pages shorter. Sometimes Brown errs on the side of doing too much showing and not enough telling. There was excessive setup for most of the races he describes and a lot of extraneous information that could have been cut. I also didn't find the Pocock quotes at the beginning of each chapter to be particularly poetic or inspiring.
One of the main things that kept me reading was the fact that I have lived and traveled to enough of Washington state that I recognized many of the places and found accounts of what things were like here in the 1930s pretty interesting. I was fascinated to see the real roots of some of the culture of this region and I appreciated some of those cultural traits reflected in Joe. All in all, I like Joe Rantz, and I would have appreciated it if the book hadn't pretended to be about the whole boat.
Ultimately I think this book would be much more interesting if it were 50-100 pages shorter. Sometimes Brown errs on the side of doing too much showing and not enough telling. There was excessive setup for most of the races he describes and a lot of extraneous information that could have been cut. I also didn't find the Pocock quotes at the beginning of each chapter to be particularly poetic or inspiring.
One of the main things that kept me reading was the fact that I have lived and traveled to enough of Washington state that I recognized many of the places and found accounts of what things were like here in the 1930s pretty interesting. I was fascinated to see the real roots of some of the culture of this region and I appreciated some of those cultural traits reflected in Joe. All in all, I like Joe Rantz, and I would have appreciated it if the book hadn't pretended to be about the whole boat.