(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.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.
-
Weapons: Julia Garner stars in 'hyper-eerie' psychological thrillerThe Week Recommends Zach Cregger's 'top notch' new film opens with 17 children disappearing at exactly the same time
-
Freakier Friday: Lohan and Curtis reunite for 'uneven' but 'endearing' sequelThe Week Recommends Mother-and-daughter comedy returns with four characters switching bodies
-
Al fresco art: the UK's best sculpture parksThe Week Recommends Soak up the scenery with a stroll through these open-air galleries
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”