Review of The Boys In the Boat by Daniel James Brown

I finally got around to reading The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown. I completely understand why this book received so many rave reviews from critics and readers alike. Somehow, Brown managed to make a book about a somewhat obscure historical sporting event deeply compelling and accessible.  I never would have picked this book up without the buzz, so I’m very glad for all the press this one received. This is truly terrific narrative nonfiction – meticulously researched and richly described.

The story follows the University of Washington 1936 Varsity Crew team’s path to the Olympics. The role of the 1936 Olympics in obscuring Nazi activity is a subplot of this book, and it also makes it clear which team the reader is supposed to root for in the race (hint: America).

The main “character” Brown follows is Joe Rantz, a boy who grew up in rural Washington State with few resources. OK, that is an understatement. Rantz grew up in Depression-era rural Washington with an evil stepmother. He was eventually abandoned by his whole family and had to fend for himself. The reader follows Rantz as he tries to support himself as a kid on his own, as he gets himself into college, and as he finds his way to the crew team and then works to stay there. In this sense, The Boys in the Boat can be seen as a story of individual “grit.” How does this boy push himself up and over obstacles to succeed?

The other part of the story concerns the crew team and the coaches that built this winning team without much money or a legacy of support. The head coach found that his top athletes, who were so strong as individuals, didn’t always work together well. There was something in the relationship between the athletes that was important. In this sense, The Boys in the Boat can be seen as a story of the value of connection and trust and common endeavor.

These two themes – the triumph of the individual against-all-odds and the deep value of community -- are clichés in sports stories, so The Boys in the Boat isn’t really journeying into new territory here. But, if my book club conversation is any indication, both of these themes continue to matter. We talked about the parental role in developing “grit,” but we also saw that individual grit alone wasn’t enough to propel success for Rantz and his teammates. There had to be “public” support (mentorship; institutional commitment; the commitment to develop relationships, etc.).

That question – whether “success” is a result of individual characteristics and behaviors or a result of social conditions created by policy -- is an issue that policy makers continue to deliberate. When Paul Tough released How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character in 2012, critics suggested that the conversation about grit was deflecting from the fact that we are reducing our public funding of institutions that build strong communities and networks. An example of that can be found in public willingness to invest in character education programs in schools that serve low-income students while reducing funding for after-school programs, community centers, and family support.  The flip side can be seen in affluent communities, where there are all sorts of community supports but very little willingness to let children experience obstacles.

While The Boys in the Boat fits into this larger conversation, this is still a book about sports. My heart pounded during the sports scenes, even though I don’t really care about crew races, and I was pretty clear about who was going to win. It is being made into a movie, which will likely involve buff young actors, triumphant music, and a feel-good ending. When it makes it to the big screen, I will be in the audience, with popcorn.

You can find a good interview with Brown here. He helpfully points out that he is NOT the DaVinci Code Dan Brown.

Review of That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott

My book club decided to try to read more broadly this year – to include books from more places and cultures into our monthly mix. One of our members is from Australia, and we asked her to choose something that would help us better understand her country. I imagined something about sunshine, surfing, crocodiles….

But Haha! That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott is a novel about the colonization of western Australia during the 1800s.  And like most accounts of cultural imperialism, this isn’t a novel about good times at the beach.

Kim Scott comes to this project as a bicultural author. His mother is white, and his father is Aboriginal. And perhaps due to that heritage, he sets about writing a complicated fictionalized history of cross-cultural contact. There are a  host of characters that include British settlers, merchants, opportunists, and prisoners, American whalers, and Aboriginal men, women, and children.  At the center is Bobby Wabalanginy, a Noongar boy whose name means “all of us playing together.” Bobby has many roles in the book – he is an integral member of his tribal family; he is a guide for the colonists; he is at times an opportunist himself. As the reader watches Bobby grow, s/he also watches the interactions between the colonists and the native peoples become less about accommodation and more about domination.

I can see why this is an important book. It doesn’t portray the Noongar people as simple victims, nor does it gloss over the violence and the exploitation by white people. The diversity of characters with different motivations gives the reader a sense that colonialism in Australia didn’t involve a single story or narrative.

Still, this isn’t a book that I particularly enjoyed reading. I felt at a distance from all of the characters, perhaps because of the sheer number of them. I couldn’t quite “see” the setting as I read, when I had hoped to be clearly transported to a different time and place. The author claims that he “wants his writing to be valued for the discussion it stimulates in the wider community, rather than for the writing itself.” In that sense, this book is clearly an achievement. But for me, getting through this novel involved work and commitment, and perhaps the accountability a book club provides.

I took to the interwebs to see if there are some good lists out there for readers who want to explore postcolonial literature, and I was directed to just about every university in the world. This list from UCLA seems like a good place to start. You can also find an interesting review of That Deadman Dance here, and you can find a compelling interview with the author here.

Review of Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho and Thoughts on Bookclubbery

I liked Veronika Decides to Die, but I would have liked it even more if I had read it when I was 20 and playing around with my own vision of “the good life.” The plot involves a young woman in Slovenia in the 1990s that is fed up with her mundane existence and tries to commit suicide unsuccessfully. She wakes up in a mental hospital and is told that she experienced complications from her drug overdose and will die in five days. What follows is an exploration of how she and several other patients in the hospital think about what kind of decisions to make in the face of having only a few days to live.

Books that are driven by a Big Idea rather than by its characters do not tend to be my favorites, because it often seems as if the characters are being “used” by the author rather than being allowed to develop on their own. That did happen in this case – Coelho wants to propose a philosophy of authentic living here, and the characters and plot are created to promote this philosophy. But, still, this book is compelling in its earnestness, and I was rooting for the characters to be able to experience freedom on their own terms.

Coelho’s philosophy has two parts. First, he believes that Western society has sanity and insanity flipped. We call “normal” those who conform to a routine, boxed-in life. We call “crazy” those people who deviate from social expectations or who freely express their passion – artists, creators, dreamers.

Second, living a “normal” life builds up boredom and resentment and bitterness. Once these negative feelings overcome a person, the will to live well – or live freely – subsides. Coelho seems to be asking how people can break the shackles of this “normalcy.”

The twenty-year-old me would have enjoyed discussing these ideas in the dorm commons at one in the morning. But, as it turns out, the older me really enjoyed talking about this book at my book club this week (not at one in the morning).

In fact, Veronika Decides to Die generated one of the longest discussions about a book our group has ever had (as opposed to discussions about families or food or politics or whatever). That got me thinking about what kinds of books are best for book club discussions. Here’s what I have come up with so far:

1)   The book has to have some sort of larger theme or idea it’s exploring. The fact that Veronika Decides to Die is idea-driven actually worked to our advantage here. Our group talked about the concept of sanity. We talked about mental health. We talked about the “right to die.” People brought up their own experiences and decisions. While some character-driven books allow us to play with the text (Did you like the ending? Did the character make realistic choices?), they don’t pull us up and out toward the real world. So, oddly, the books that I tend to enjoy the most don’t necessarily spark the best discussions.

2)   The book needs to be short enough for people to finish. If people are not done with the book, it’s hard to talk about the resolution.  Veronika Decides to Die is 210 pages, and everyone at the table completed it. It would have been difficult to discuss Coelho’s philosophy without knowing what happens to Veronika at the end.

3)   It’s great if the book spurs a question for which there’s no clear answer. In this case, we wondered why Veronika Decides to Die is set in Slovenia. Is there something about that place and that time (late 1990s) that made talking about authentic living important? We puzzled through what freedom might have meant in that part of the world during and after the Bosnian War, and we considered the fact that Slovenia was a brand new republic. We are still puzzling.

I trolled around the interwebs looking for insight on good ideas for choosing books for discussions. Here’s a link to librarian Nancy Pearl’s ideas about the topic. She also makes a list of novels she thinks could propel a lively conversation:

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski
The Plague of Doves and The Round House by Louise Erdrich
In the Woods by Tana French
A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
Among Others by Jo Walton
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

So what do YOU think? Do you agree with Nancy Pearl? Do you have books to add? And what about nonfiction? Please weigh in. Hint: leave a comment.