They rowed for the
University of Washington, but they did all of America proud. They came up when
America was down, mired in the Great Depression, with millions out of work.
Hitler’s Germany was on the rise, and the Berlin Summer Games was a propaganda colossus
engineered by Hitler and Goebbels to assure the world that Germany was no
threat to anyone.
Brown was able to show us America in the Depression and
Germany early in Hitler’s reign of terror, but still give us individual stories
of these nine teenagers who rowed for the University of Washington.
The thread that runs
through the book is the story of Joe Rantz who rowed second in the crew. Brown tells about Joe's childhood – bereft of his mother at age 5, hated by
his stepmother, abandoned by his family when he was only 15. Joe overcame poverty,
loneliness, and his own understandable self-doubt to earn a spot on the varsity
rowing team that won a national title and then Olympic gold.
I see at least three great lessons in The Boys in the Boat.
There is great beauty in trying your hardest, doing
your best, and refusing to give up.
From George Pocock, the English boat builder, who crafted with his own hands
the lightest, strongest, most beautiful “shells” that the boys rowed across the
water, to the coaches who molded young men into a gold-medal team, to the boys themselves,
rowing literally thousands of practice miles in stormy, cold, dark water,
soaked to the skin and beyond exhausted, you see the value and dignity and joy
of giving your all.
We were made for family. When Joe’s family is packed and ready to drive
away, and his father tells him he can’t come, it is heartbreaking. The book is
about the longing for family, and how Joe found it with the other boys in the
boat. But there’s also the gentle story of Joyce, who became his friend in high
school and then his wife, and how she made a loving family for them for the
next sixty-three years.
Good will triumph over evil. We Christians know why this is true, and even
though religious faith isn’t a strong theme in Brown’s book, the theme of light
overcoming darkness is. One of the most luminous passages in the book comes in
the epilogue. Brown visited Berlin in 2011 and stood in the Olympic stadium
where Hitler stood 75 years before, with over 100,000 people Sieg Heiling in
thunderous unison.
Standing there... it occurred to me that when Hitler watched Joe and the boys fight their way back from the rear of the field to sweep ahead of Italy and Germany seventy-five years ago, he saw, but did not recognize, heralds of his doom. He could not have known that one day hundreds of thousands of boys just like them, boys who shared their essential natures – decent and unassuming, not privileged or favored by anything in particular, just loyal, committed, and perseverant – would return to Germany dressed in olive drab, hunting him down.
They are almost all gone now - the legions of young men who saved the world in the years just before I was born. But that afternoon, standing on the balcony of Haus West, I was swept with gratitude for their goodness and their grace, their humility and their honor, their simple civility and all the things they taught us before they flitted across the evening water and finally vanished into the night. (p. 368)What a great book.
