A review by maiakobabe
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown

adventurous informative medium-paced

3.5

I picked this up after watching the film of the same name. It's a very well researched history of the University of Washington men's eight rowing team, a bunch of boys raised during the worst of the Great Depression, working their assess off to represent the US at the 1936 Olympics. The book follows Joe Rantz most closely, in huge part because he was one of the few members of the team still alive and available to interview when the author began the book. However, several of the others kept diaries or wrote letters which the author also had access to. There's a lot of background on the era, both the economic hardships of the Depression and Dust Bowl in the US, and also the way Joseph Goebbels planned the entire Berlin Olympics as a massive propaganda project to fool the West into thinking that Germany wasn't planning war. I thought the book was a little longer than it needed to be, but overall enjoyed it as a good audiobook to keep me company during work hours. As always, the truth of the story is even stranger and more dramatic than the version of this story that made it to film!