Category: Non-Fiction Reviews

THE BOYS IN THE BOAT, by Daniel James Brown

Brown’s robust book tells the irresistible story of the University of Washington’s rowing team and their epic quest for a gold medal in the 1936 Olympics. I must admit that, before starting on the book, I was a little skeptical, primarily because I didn’t think there was much to rowing—a little arm exercise pretty much summed it up for me. You know what Mark Twain said about golf—a good walk ruined.  Well, I thought rowing was a good paddle ruined…

And, while the book itself could be a little plodding early on, perhaps providing too much detail for me, I did come to enjoy it very much, particularly when Brown described an early race, I could feel the splash of the oars. More important, perhaps, I learned that rowing is a very complicated, precise, and interesting sport that, contrary to my previous view, uses practically every muscle. It became clear that readers do not need an interest in competitive rowing to be captivated by this remarkably crafted history.

Brown offers a vivid picture of the relentlessly demanding effort of the rowers and the precision that goes into the making of a first-class boat. Mentored not just by visionary Coach Al Ulbrickson, but by the genius of eccentric boat-builder George Pocock, the teammates learned to trust themselves and to row with grace, unmatched precision, and power. Their collective result was perfection, as was the book by Brown.

At the heart of the book is a heart-warming story of Joe Rantz, who was abandoned by his father — left to fend for himself at a very young age, but who as a resourceful teenager won back his dignity to become an ideal hero by employing his determination to overcome the odds. Neither he, nor his team was ever expected to defeat the elite teams on the east coast, nor to have the opportunity to go on to shock the world by defeating the Germans in front of Adolf Hitler.

More than just a sports story, Boys in the Boat is a fascinating work of history. The reader gets a vivid picture of the depression era, the building of the Grand Coulee dam (where Joe worked during the summer to earn tuition money), the dust bowl, Hitler’s rise to power—all culminating in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. I was reminded somewhat of Bill Bryson’s One Summer, which similarly covered a variety of momentous events during the summer of 1927.

I also enjoyed reading about Leni Riefenstahl, the genius who directed Hitler’s propaganda films for the world, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, which won many awards. And I really enjoyed the conversations our book club had over a three-week period. I believe we all came away with a deep appreciation for the sport, and Karen Lynch’s added perspective as a coxswain for and member of the University of Iowa rowing team put the icing on the cake.

“Harmony, balance, rhythm; A symphony of motion,” said the legendary designer of racing shells George Pocock. “There you have it. That’s what life is all about.” And that’s what this book is all about.—Ken Johnson

NOTE: An episode of PBS’s American Experience was based on the book, titled The Boys of  ’36. You can livestream it through them or Netflix.

One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson

In One Summer: America, 1927, Bill Bryson—a prodigious researcher and a talented storyteller—takes us on a meandering journey through four months in a pivotal American year. He starts with the devastating Mississippi flood, pauses to introduce us to Charles Lindbergh and then interrupts that with a story about Babe Ruth, then it’s on to Henry Ford, Calvin Coolidge, Al Capone, Al Jolson, Sacco and Vanzetti, Gene Tunney, and a batch of lesser characters.

He weaves these stories into a narrative that is hilarious, fascinating, frustrating, terrifying, and educational.

Apparently women weren’t yet invented, because Bryson introduces us to only a few—the notorious Ruth Snyder who conspired with her lover to kill her husband, Warren Harding’s wife who may or may not have poisoned him but who nevertheless refused to allow his body to be autopsied, and Clara Bow, the silent movie star and original “It” girl whose career nosedived because her nasal voice was too jarring to withstand the talkies.

That aside, this book is a delight. Bryson’s style is delicious and the details he shares are compelling and often bizarre. A few examples:

• President Coolidge reportedly worked an average of only four hours a day, napped more than any other president, and took three months off to live in South Dakota where he play-acted as a cowboy, complete with oversized hat and chaps. While he was there, he gave the nod to the creation of Mount Rushmore.

• Men apparently urinated wherever with startling abandon. President Warren Harding was reported to urinate in the White House fireplace. And Al Jolson, star of The Jazz Singer, urinated on people as some sort of joke. Bryson notes that this could explain why he had four wives and few friends. Why he had any of either is surprising.

• Hordes of people—tens of thousands—congregated wherever Lindbergh landed and overwhelmed him so much that he occasionally avoided them by coasting for extended periods at 30 feet above what might well have been terrified farmers and their cows. One measure of the size of his following: the ticker-tape parade thrown for him in Manhattan in 1927 generated 1,800 tons of debris. In contrast, the armistice parade of 1918 created a paltry 155 tons.

• “There was almost nothing Henry Ford did that didn’t have some bad in it somewhere,” Bryson writes. Case in point: his “Fordlandia” settlement in Brazil, an Americanized city plopped down into the rain forest, with cozy frame houses, a Main Street, and paved avenues that dead-ended in the jungle on all sides. Not surprisingly, it was a flop.

• The wonderfully-named Philo Farnsworth may actually have invented the television but the idea was stolen, which made him so mad \”even his hair looked angry.”

• The Mississippi flood covered 16.5 million acres and cost more 1,000 lives. The human loss was “perhaps several times that,” Bryson cynically writes, but those counting “weren’t more scrupulous because, alas, so many of the victims were poor and black.”

• Bryson calls this time period “the Age of Loathing,” noting, “There may never have been another time in the nation’s history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason.” For example, Ku Klux Klan groups formed throughout the country and were full of community “leaders” opposed to Catholics, Jews, Italians, and most other “foreigners.” And the pseudoscience of eugenics was backed by top scholars, physicians, politicians, and the Supreme Court, which upheld the “right” of states to forcibly sterilize tens of thousands of Americans, considered “imbeciles” and expendable. Most at risk were the poor and unmarried women.

• Xenophobia was literally the law of the land. “Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone,” he writes. “When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: ‘There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.’”

• The Federal Reserve, supported by four odd ducks from the United States, England, France, and Germany, met and, with the best of intentions, set the stage for the Great Depression in 1929.

• Railroads were sometimes built with little rhyme or reason. Bryson writes about one such line, the Pere Marquette, which “wandered confusedly around the upper Midwest, as if looking for a lost item.” And he offers a more general point about our fond memories of railroads: “The romance of travel wasn’t always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.”

• When Babe Ruth was seven, his father, knowing he did not have the resources to raise him properly, dropped him off at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. Without this, he might have had no career. One of the Brothers at the school was an avid baseball fan, and his coaching got Ruth started on the sport. By 19, he was playing professionally, first as a pitcher and ultimately as a hitter. He was a remarkable athlete but a dazzlingly uncouth person.

• For book lovers, this could have been the Good Old Days. “The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life,” Bryson writes. “Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than 10,000 separate titles, double the number of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of literary possibility, a helpful new phenomenon, the book club, had just made its debut. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 and was followed the next year by the Literary Guild.”

Bryson, our hometown talent, is a treasure. Few writers could take all this data and turn it into such a captivating maze of mesmerizing tales. Fewer still would do the type of research that gives the stories credence. —PEP

The Color of Water, by James McBride

The Color of Water is a success story, a testament to one woman’s true heart, solid values, and indomitable will.  The story is told in two voices which alternate throughout the book. In telling his mother’s story, along with his, James McBride addresses racial identity with compassion, insight, and realism. It is, in a word, inspiring.  

McBride, a journalist and musician, explores his mother’s past, recreating her remarkable story, as well as his own upbringing and heritage in a poignant and powerful debut novel. He skillfully relates his life story and his coming to terms with his mixed ethnic and religious heritage, with chapters conveying his mother’s travails and development into a fervent Baptist.
 
His mother, born Rachel Shilsky, who changed her name to Ruth to be more American, is a story of a woman whose parents fled the anti-Jewish pogroms of Central Europe and landed in a Suffolk, Virginia, a violently racist small southern town, there to be faced by new anti-Semitism and racial prejudices and develop a few of their own.  Her father, rabbi turned storekeeper, was a cold, sexually abusive tyrant who kept his children in virtual servitude, exploited his black customers, and ultimately abandoned his wife.
 
However, her grim upbringing is left behind when she moves to Harlem, marries Dennis, a black minister, fervently adopts Christianity, and raises eight children. When she fell in love with Dennis, she said “He came from a home where kindness was a way of life.  I wanted to be in this kind of family.  I was proud to join it, and they were happy to have me.” However, they experienced a certain degree of prejudice as a result of their interracial marriage.  They opened the New Brown Memorial Church together.  Then Dennis fell ill with lung cancer and died just before James was born.
Widowed, alone and poor, she struggled fiercely to raise her family. Then she remarried to Andrew McBride, another black man, and raised four more children before he also died.
 
James reports that he grew up in “orchestrated chaos”, with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. As a child, he became aware that his mother was different from others around him.  She was white, and she kept secrets. It is her voice, unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic, that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution.
 
In the answer that gives the book’s its title, she says “God’s not black. He’s not white.  God is the color of water.  Water doesn’t have a color.” She schemed shrewdly to have all her children buses to schools predominately in Jewish neighborhoods, sure that learning was a priority there.  James was pleasantly surprised when he learned during his senior year in high school that he had been admitted to Oberlin College.  He and his eleven siblings all completed college and led successful careers.
 
The triumph of the book is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories of family love, the sheer force of a mother’s will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church, a respect for education and religion. Issues of race and identity took secondary importance to her beliefs.
 
At 65, Ruth went back to school and earned a college degree in social work.  She remains in close contact with her children, holding holiday gatherings where everyone sleeps on the floor or rugs in shifts, double or triple in bed – just like the old times.
 
The Color of Waterwill make you proud to be a member of the human race. This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths.  The two stories, son’s and mother’s, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note, particularly at this current time of racial polarization.—Kenneth N. Johnson