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've always admired Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, thereby infuriating Hitler, who stormed out of the stadium after this black man from Alabama so visibly challenged Nazi fantasies of racial superiority ( at least as the usual story goes; there is now some doubt). So what if a group of brawny white boys from the University of Washington managed to win a gold medal in the eight-man boat race? Their feat - however impressive - will always seem less spectacular by contrast.

In the hands of Daniel James Brown, however, their story becomes a fine-grained portrait of the Depression era, with its economic and climatic horrors set against youthful dreams. Brown finds a representative figure in Joe Rantz, a poor boy whose determination to overcome odds make him an ideal hero. Brown learned the details of Rantz's brilliant rowing career from the athlete himself. But this story wasn't just about him; it was always about the boat: nine rangy boys - sons of farmers, fishermen, and loggers - who managed to coalesce into a rowing team that would march confidently into the 1936 Olympics under the hawkish eyes of Hitler, emerging victorious over rival crews from Germany and Italy.

Like other members of the team, Rantz struggled to survive difficult circumstances. But if he was buoyed by his teenaged sweetheart, Joyce, their relationship needn't have been described in passages that might have issued from the pen of a run-of-the mill romance novelist. "And so when Joyce had first laid eyes on Joe Rantz," says Brown, "when she had first heard his boisterous laugh and seen mirth in his eyes ... she had been drawn to him, seen in him at once a window to a wider and sunnier world."

A hackneyed element dogs Brown's prose. Joe is "poor as a church mouse"; the rowing team were lost in "a whirl of activity"; a "gentle autumn breeze tousled their mostly fair hair." He nevertheless has some gift for narrative, and one quickly gets lost in the story, in the lore of rowing, which has a rich history in the US, reaching back to the mid-19th century, when elite universities began to assemble teams. The Harvard-Yale race in 1852 was, Brown informs us, "the first American intercollegiate athletic event of any kind".

Before the dawn of TV sports, when bouncing balls rose into their current lofty position in pop culture, successful rowers were held in very high esteem. One can't imagine a ticker tape parade for a rowing team nowadays, not like the one that greeted a victorious crew in Seattle in the early 30s, with speeches by the mayor and other dignitaries. The press often swarmed around the coaches, begging for tidbits and prognostications, and there were rumours of huge payouts for topline coaches, such as Tom Bolles, who assisted his former teammate, Al Ulbrickson, at Washington. (In the background of this narrative lurks Ky Ebright, a former Washingtonian who took over the California team - Washington's major rival on the west coast.)

Standing behind the coaches is George Pocock, an English boat-builder who learned the art of building wooden shells for racing from his father. He is the "quiet master" throughout, on the sidelines, ever inventive, full of wise words. His comments, in fact, serve as rather corny epigraphs to each chapter. Pocock says, for instance: "Good thoughts have much to do with good rowing. It isn't enough for the muscles of a crew to work in unison; their hearts and minds must also work as one." But then one does not expect wit or irony in coaches.

The task of shaping a motley crew of young men into an Olympic team to venture into the heart of Nazi darkness seems like cinematic gold. So, not surprisingly, a film version of The Boys in the Boat is already in development, with Kenneth Branagh signed to direct what might well become another Chariots of Fire - or Seabiscuit.

Brown digs into his material with impressive energy, trying to understand the dynamics of the sport, which he conveys with enthusiasm. "One of the fundamental challenges in rowing," he writes, "is that when any one member of a crew goes into a slump the entire crew goes with him." Such slumps occur, and Brown dramatises them well, arranging the facts in ways that create a narrative drumbeat that never eases till the end. As the Washington crew races in Seattle, Poughkeepsie, New York or, finally, in Nazi Germany, one roots for the good guys.

And it doubtless helps the narrative that the bad guys are so bad. We get intermittent snapshots of key members of the Nazi Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, run by Joseph Goebbels, who appears in all his monstrosity in these pages, limping around the Third Reich and leering at young starlets, much to the annoyance of his wife, Magda. He was rejected in love by the "beautiful and brilliant" Leni Riefenstahl, at least according to Riefenstahl, who produced, directed and starred in her own films. Riefenstahl, much to Goebbels' annoyance, won the affections and gratitude of the Führer as she produced several of the most successful propaganda films of all time, such as Triumph of the Will, which documented a massive Nazi rally at Nuremberg in 1934. Riefenstahl's film of the 1936 Olympics was meant to record the splendours of the Reich, but the American team denied her a "proper" ending to the eight-oar race, a very popular event.

Among the good cards Brown has been handed are that two of the American rowers fell desperately ill before the race, though they persevered at the insistence of their coach. Also, as if to increase the tension, the American team was given the worst lane, putting them in the path of severe crosswinds. Throughout the race, the crowd cheered wildly for Germany, as they would. Everything seemed to tilt against the boys in the boat, but they prevailed, coming from behind, beating Italy by eight feet, leaving the German crew in third place.

I was impressed with Brown's research, imagining the countless interviews, the exhumation of journals and logs, and the patient review of long-defunct newspaper articles and photographs it must have involved. The Boys in the Boat is, then, an often inspiring feat of narrative non-fiction, though it could never be as thrilling as the victory of those nine boys from Washington state on a windy day in Berlin once upon a very dark time.

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The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown - review

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've always admired Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, thereby infuriating Hitler, who stormed out of the stadium after this black man from Alabama so visibly challenged Nazi fantasies of racial superiority ( at least as the usual story goes; there is now some doubt).

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This book review is very helpful to wrap your head around some difficult concepts of the book. This book review includes real life photos of the team and the people included in the book.

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"Home, it was beginning to seem, was something you couldn't necessarily count on." (Page 31)

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This quote shows how much Joe's struggle at home was. At a young age he lost his mom and his father abandoned him also at a young age. So Joe never had a tight nite close family relationship. This forced Joe to become very independent and not to lean on anyone for help but to stand strong on his own feet.

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Washington's 1936 Olympic Team - The Boys in the Boat

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The Boys in the Boat - and his powerful narrative of the men that lived it - has generated renewed interest in this remarkable story. Below you will find a continuous collection of information; some of it new, some of it originally compiled during the 2002-2003 Centennial season, but all of it relating to the '36 team.