Daniel James Brown

The Boys in the Boat celebrates the rise to prominence and the eventual Olympic gold medal performance of the 1936 U.S. men’s eight-oar rowing team—nine working class boys who stormed the rowing world, transformed the sport, and galvanized the attention of millions of Americans.

A motley assemblage of young men from the American West, over the course of three years they took on and defeated not only their bitter rivals for regional supremacy—the boys from the University of California—but also successive echelons of privilege and power. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, they defeated first the sons of bankers and senators rowing for elite eastern universities, then the sons of British aristocrats rowing for Oxford and Cambridge, and finally the Aryan sons of the Nazi state rowing for Adolf Hitler.

Against the grim backdrop of the Great Depression, their stunning victories demonstrated that ordinary folk could still sometimes prevail over long established privileges and customs as well as over crushing economic circumstances. They reaffirmed the American notion that merit, in the end, outweighs birthright. They reminded the country of what can be done when everyone quite literally pulls together. And they provided hope that in the titanic struggle that lay just ahead, the ruthless might of the Nazis would not prevail over American grit, determination, and optimism.