The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympicsby Daniel James Brown

(Viking, $29)

It’s hardly surprising that Hollywood pounced on this book well before it was published, said Jeffrey Burke in Bloomberg Businessweek. Daniel James Brown’s “stirring tale” of nine Depression-era athletes mounting an unlikely rise to the global stage has all the elements of a classic sports drama. Its scrappy underdogs are rowers from the University of Washington who were never expected to challenge the elite. For the team’s sage, there’s a boat builder who’s “equal parts Yoda and Noah.” And for bad guys, Brown has the Nazis. The author uses “his big rich newsreel voice” a bit too often, but the tone often fits his material.

The rowers’ individual stories prove “almost as compelling as the rise of the team itself,” said Kevin J. Hamilton in The Seattle Times. “Perhaps the most unlikely member” of the team was Joe Rantz, a Spokane native who overcame homelessness to work his way through college by helping to build the Grand Coulee Dam. But his teammates included the sons of loggers, farmers, and shipyard workers, and they learned that by trusting each other they could overcome even the Ivy League’s perennial powerhouses. When they earn a bid to face a skilled German crew at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, you can guess who’ll win. But Brown’s narrative rises to the occasion, “with the final 50 pages blurring by with white-knuckled suspense as these all-American underdogs pull off the unimaginable.”

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To get there, readers must endure a healthy dose of purple prose, said Alex Beam in The Boston Globe. Like many others who’ve written about the sport, Brown can’t resist dousing us all in “Mystical Rowing Mumbo Jumbo—the ineffable je ne sais quoi of moving oars through water.” Still, if you were to assemble “a great regatta of books about rowing,” this one “certainly makes the final heat.” Though “wildly overlong” and “occasionally maudlin,” it tells a wonderful, “affecting” story.