About ninety percent of the reason I chose this book was because Edward Herrmann (aka Richard Gilmore) was the narrator of the audiobook. The other ten percent was a lingering Olympic hangover. What didn’t factor into the equation was any particular fondness for, or interest in, the sport of rowing. I’ve never rowed and rowing was one of the sports I didn’t really get into during this summer’s games. It doesn’t really pop on television, at least in my opinion.
Still, The Boys in the Boat has the kind of premise sports-movie fans like me can’t resist. A ragtag collection of working class boys, many of them paying their own way through school, upset the apple cart of the toney, upper-class world of collegiate rowing, leading the University of Washington to triumphs over the likes of Harvard and Yale. They then move on to the Olympics, representing the United States at not just any Summer Olympics, but the 1936 Games in Berlin, where Adolf Hitler was doing his best to advertise the Third Reich as the wave of the future. Despite the difficulty involved in even getting to the games themselves, let alone dealing with some curious officiating in advance of their races, the boys from Washington took home the gold. It’s an inspiring, emotional story.
Unfortunately, it couldn’t fully overcome my lack of interest in rowing. I don’t blame author Daniel James Brown; there’s only so much you can do when describing an activity as repetitive as rowing. There’s some intrigue within the team over which of the boys will get to row in which boat, but that was a little hard to follow, honestly.
Brown is much more compelling when detailing the efforts undertaken by the Nazis to trick the world into thinking everything was going great in Germany. They took down Anti-Semitic signs and suspended some of their enforcement, while investing heavily in propaganda, including the film work of Len Riefenstahl.
Ultimately, The Boys in the Boat is a perfectly fine story of hard work and determination. It is just a tad too predictable and straightforward to be all that memorable.