'It made him whole.' Why 'The Boys in the Boat' is more than a tale of Olympic triumph

This is KUOW's book club, and we’re wrapping up "The Boys in the Boat" by Daniel James Brown. I'm your club guide, Katie Campbell.

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he word I keep coming back to when describing "The Boys in the Boat" is "wholesome." That may sound trite, but the story of University of Washington's crew team and their quest for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympic embodies this definition: conducive to or promoting moral well-being.

I learned how it came to be so wholesome when I sat down to talk to the author. Brown himself struck me as a wholesome storyteller, someone who put his whole heart and soul into telling this story.

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"It really did feel wholesome," he said when I put that description to him. "And at times, I was little worried that it would come across as corny ... But it's not that I was trying to characterize them. It's just who they were."

"They," of course, were the eight young oarsmen and their coxswain who shocked the rowing world as freshman (or frosh) and kept right on pulling off incredible victories, until they won the ultimate victory in Adolf Hitler's Germany. Brown's main character, Joe Rantz, and his teammates pulled off what seemed like a near-impossible victory to win gold in the eight-oar race. But as Brown explained, their story meant a lot more than winning the gold medal.

"On one level, it's just a boat race, right? Great. OK, it's an Olympic boat race. Great," he said. "On a symbolic level, it is really two completely different views of the world brought face to face."

On the one side, there were the German and Italian crews, representing the fascist powers that were only just beginning to wreak havoc on Europe. And on the other, the United States, certainly imperfect — Jews faced discrimination here, too, as did Black people, a fact athletes had to grapple with as they decided whether to participate in the 1936 Olympics to begin with — but representing a more hopeful future, representing freedom.

"That whole generation of Americans, there was almost nobody who didn't suffer at the hands of the [the Dust Bowl, then the Great Depression, then finally, World War II]," Brown said. "They had to learn to pull together."

Consider this passage, as Rantz reflects on their Olympic win:

Brown had the opportunity to meet Rantz late is his life. As he told it, the titular boys' story "walked into my house one day." Really, it was his neighbor Judy Rantz, who'd come to invite Brown to meet her father. Brown said he immediately felt bonded to Joe Rantz, who so reminded Brown of his own father — they shared a difficult past and the humility it cultivated in them.

Joe Rantz died just a few months after they met, but Brown talked to Judy Rantz, the keeper of so much research about her father and his crewmates, just about every day as he set out to write this story. As Brown noted in the book many times, he had the benefit of several of the boys' diaries from those years, from which he learned more about them and about each other.

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Above all, Brown learned how deeply important the team was to Joe Rantz.

"You have to remember that Joe had no home," Brown said, referring to how Rantz was cast aside by his own father more than once. "In some ways, his life from that point until that gold-medal moment was a quest to get back to something he could feel safe in, something he could call home. ... This was a moment of redemption. This was something nobody could take away. This was something that would endure for the rest of his life — and as we've seen with the book, beyond his life.

"It made him whole. It healed him."

It's been 11 years since "The Boys in the Boat" was published. The story endures, I think, because of this healing journey Brown takes the reader on alongside Rantz. It's more than a sports story, more than a history text: it's fundamentally human.

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I was honest with Brown at the top of our interview. I told him I hadn't expected to enjoy "The Boys in the Boat" all that much. And I told him I was pleasantly surprised to discover just how much I like it. I cannot stop talking about it, and I stayed up late one night thinking about where exactly on my top 10 books list it lands (somewhere between "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin and Susan Orlean's "The Library Book," I think). Demonstrating the same humility he described in his father and Joe Rantz, Brown said he was surprised by the book's popularity, too.

"When the book came out, it got off to a slow start. We didn't have a big New York Times book review or the Today show or anything like that," he said. "It just kind of grew organically, and it took a while to get going. But once it did, it became a word-of-mouth book."

That makes sense to me. It's not splashy or fussy. Rather, it luxuriates in details like the moment Rantz is assigned to the boat that would go on to the Olympics, and his friend Roger Morris calls out, "Hey, Joe, I see you finally found the right boat!". Or the arresting way the racing shell-builder George Pocock talked about his craft (and Brown honored it):

And that's what I will take away from "The Boys in the Boat": the feeling that I've learned something about why we live to see another day, the feeling that there's a purpose greater than the individual. You've just got to be willing to get into the boat and row until your heart gives out (and the Nazis go to hell).