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.

The Songcatcher, by Sharyn McCrumb

                                                   
 
“And  where she’s been and what she’s seen, 
     no living soul may know, 
And when she’s come back home, 
     she will be changed—oh!”
“The Rowan Stave” Ballad

Lark McCourry is a popular folk singer whose tours regularly take her across the country.  But her roots and strong family ties are in the small town in the mountains of North Carolina where she grew up and learned to love folk music, especially ballads— and most especially The Rowan Stave ballad.  Lark moved from the mountains to the big cities to build her singing career.  But she continues to be haunted by the memory of the The Rowan Stave ballad.  She knows the song has been in her family for generations and finally feels compelled to leave her singing tour and travel back to the mountains to begin her journey to find it and restore a piece of her family’s past.  Her quest leads her to her estranged father, now a lonely and angry old man living alone, and dying, in the North Carolina mountains.

She also meets Nora Bonesteel, a wise mountain woman who talks to both the living and the dead, and who may be able to help with Lark’s search.  Nora believes that old, lost songs are a touchstone to the past, and so is eager to help Lark.

Songcatcher is the story of Lark’s journey.  But it also is the story of the lyrical, haunting ballad that has woven its way through generations, across oceans and mountains, from Scotland and Ireland and England to the hill country of North Carolina.

The first settlers in the North Carolina mountains brought the folk songs they’d sung in their homeland with them to their new home and sung them to their children, then to their grandchildren and great grandchildren.

The ballad was first heard in 1759 by a nine-year-old boy after he was kidnapped from the shores of his home in Scotland and taken aboard an English ship as a slave.  His name was Malcolm McCourry and during his 10 years on the ship, of all the songs he heard sung or played by his captors, “The Rowan Stave” ballad was the one he liked best.  The “strange and terrible” story in the ballad haunted him and also reminded him of home. He learned it by heart and for many years taught it to others he met on his travels.

Malcom’s other remembrance of home was the small white pebble, the “magic rock,” his mother gave him when he was just a toddler to keep him safe from drowning, a fear she’d had since a “wise woman” terrified her with a prophesy when Malcolm was born that “The sea will take him.”  He kept the small rock safe during all the years he traveled.

But when he lost his “magic” rock, he was afraid to sail without its protection.  So he jumped ship and settled in Morristown, New Jersey because he liked the “little village.”  The song went with him when he apprenticed with an attorney, became an attorney himself, and married Rachel, the daughter of the attorney who had befriended him.  It was with him when he fought bravely in the American Revolutionary War, and came home suffering from serious wounds and exhaustion.  He sang the song to his wife, then to his young son, Zebulon.

Tragically Malcolms son, Zebulon, was left an orphan after both Malcolm and Rachel died of Typhoid Fever, leaving their baby son to be raised by an uncle on his farm. Young Zeb enjoyed entertaining visitors to his village with ballads he’d learned, especially his favorite, “The Rowan Stave.”

As time went on, the ballad was shared with sons and siblings, with children and grandchildren, then continued to weave its way through generations, becoming a part of McCourry family history.

But as families grew and spread from the mountains to the and farms and small towns across the country, this ballad and other ballads and old songs— beautiful songs telling wonderful stories— began to be forgotten, replaced by new songs played in music halls and concert houses.  But the old songs were not lost to those who settled in the North Carolina mountains.  They had brought the music with them in their heads. Music was an important and constant part of their lives. And there were no concert houses or music halls in the mountains to introduce the new and different music to them.

As we follow Lark’s journey to find the ballad and her family’s legacy we learn the colorful, intriguing stories of other McCourry family members and how their lives impact each other.

Author McCrumb is a master storyteller knitting the fascinating stories of the McCourry family together with the history of The Rowan Stave ballad and other songs carried across oceans and mountains. It’s a book that held my interest and imagination from beginning to end!

P.S.  In her notes, author Sharyn McCrumb shares with us the surprising and wonderful fact that Malcolm McCourry is the author’s “four-times great grandfather.”

—Gail Stilwill

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