The Boys in the Boat

Content Warning: The source material features depictions of the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, poverty, and the abandonment of a child.

Author Daniel James Brown visits Joe, who is dying from congestive heart failure. Brown knows two things about Joe: He “hand-split the rails and cut the posts” (1) of his own home, and he, along with nine other “farm boys, fishermen, and loggers” (1), won the 1936 Olympic gold medal in rowing. Brown and Joe talk about the famous event, and Brown expresses his interest in writing a book about Joe and his accomplishments. Joe urges Brown not to write about him but about the whole boat.

It is 1933, the fourth year of the Great Depression. It is a sunny day at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the student body is still enraptured by the “improbable” ending of the latest World Series, in which the New York Giants upset the Washington Senators thanks to the series-winning home run from short hitter Mel Ott.

As other students eat lunch in the sunshine, freshman Joe enters the shell house for the Washington rowing team, the building where the boats are kept. He and his new friend Roger Morris are trying out for the freshman team, and both young men are nervous. Joe, who is very poor, is aware “he might not belong here at all” (13). Still, he hopes that joining the rowing team will get him through university. He meets freshman coach Tom Bolles as well as head coach Ulbrickson—“the boss” (15). As Ulbrickson sizes up the new recruits, he hopes that some of the boys might lead him to his dream: the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Hitler inspects the Deutsches Stadion, where he intends to build a grand sports field for the Olympics in three years’ time. Hitler and his top advisors have been chipping away at human rights in Germany, carefully crafting a false narrative with which to fool foreign athletes and visitors. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s head propagandist, abolishes the free press in Germany that same week. Brown writes, “At the very least, an Olympic interlude would help him buy time—time to convince the world of his peaceful intentions, even as he began to rebuild Germany’s military and industrial power for the titanic struggle to come” (21).

Brown steps back in time to describe Joe’s childhood and adolescence, leading up to that first moment in the Washington shell house.

Joe is born in Spokane, Washington, to Harry and Nellie Rantz, the second of their two sons. Harry Rantz is a dreamer and entrepreneur, but he struggles to find steady work. Nellie dies when Joe is four years old, and he is sent to live with his aunt in Pennsylvania, where he nearly dies of scarlet fever. After Nellie’s death, Harry marries a young woman named Thula, who resents Joe’s presence when he moves back in with his father in Spokane. Two new half-brothers quickly join the family, but “family life had already begun to fray” (30).

The family moves to a small mining camp in Idaho called Boulder City, which Joe enjoys, as “being in motion, outdoors, with wind in his face made him feel alive” (32). In contrast, Thula bitterly hates Boulder City because she feels “marooned” (35) amid far less educated people. Thula worries that Joe will displace her own sons and, after Joe pushes one of his half-brothers, she demands that 10-year-old Joe be sent away. Joe takes up residence at his school, chopping wood in exchange for room and board at the mining camp. Joe is desperately lonely, and “food was seldom far from his thoughts” (37).

One day the schoolteacher takes the class on an expedition in the woods, where he points out a fungus growing on a tree stump, declaring that it is a cauliflower mushroom, or Sparassis radicata. He explains that the mushroom is edible and makes for a delicious stew. That free food exists in the forest is a revelation to Joe.