The Boys in the Boat

My sister recently recommended to me a new non fiction. The Boys in the Boat is about the  University of Washington crew team who qualified for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Writing good and readable non-fiction is difficult.  Laura Hillenbrand did it with Unbroken. Daniel James Brown did it with The Boys in the Boat.  The background stories of the crew members is both inspiring and touching.   These young men, children of the Great Depression, did not come from a life of privilege.  Instead, they milked cows, felled trees, paved roads and caught salmon.  Nonetheless, they succeeded in defeating the well-financed crew teams from elite California and East Coast schools for the privilege of representing the United States at the 1936 Olympics. Brown gives enough details about crew racing and boat building to add reality to the story without causing the reader to glaze over.  He also juxtaposes the crew team's preparations against the propaganda machine of Adolf Hitler. The result is a non fiction book that reads like a novel and is impossible to put down until the photo finish.