The Boys in the Boat

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The Boys in the Boat Audiobook

Hi, are you looking for The Boys in the Boat audiobook? If yes, you are in the right place! ✅ scroll down to Audio player section bellow, you will find the audio of this book. Right below are top 5 reviews and comments from audiences for this book. Hope you love it!!!.

Review #1

The Boys in the Boat audiobook free

I really liked this story, I wish I could give it 5 stars, but there are too many unnecessary tangents. This is a beautiful story and it is well told, I loved Joe and the boys. It takes place during some of the darkest times in the U.S. and the world, but the boys in the boat were a shining light. While I can appreciate the author wanting to describe the tone and mood of the world there were way too many sections that were not necessary to the story. Just as I was bored and ready to quit the story would draw me back in, it would have been a 5 star if there were about 50 fewer pages.

Review #3

Audiobook The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

One of the first stories I wrote as a freshman sportswriter at my college newspaper was about the women’s crew team. The coach picked me up early in the morning and took me out on the river in the launch. That was the extent of my coverage in my collegiate career, except when I became Sports Editor I made sure crew was covered.

I grew up and live in Philadelphia, where you can see the scullers on the Schuylkill River along Kelly Drive, named for the Philadelphia native rowing Olympian, John Kelly, brother to the actress and Princess Grace Kelly. But, I’ve never been to a regatta.

Now, along comes The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. If this was simply a sports book, it might have begun in 1936, talked about the University of Washington varsity boat, how it won the national championship to qualify for the Olympic trials, won that, and miraculously came from behind to beat Italy and Germany for the gold at Hitler’s Olympics, with the Nazi leader watching. The crew of Joe Rantz, Bobby Moch, Don Hume, Chuck Day, Roger Morris, Stub McMillin, Johnny White, Gordy Adam and Shorty Hunt would be considered, by friend and adversary, the greatest eight-oar-plus-coxswain rowing group ever, and the standards by which even today’s crews are measured.

It is not simply a sports book. It is an amazing story – or stories – on many levels . You don’t need to know a lot about rowing because author Daniel James Brown will explain. Each chapter opens with a quote about a special element of rowing. These quotes are not from a coach, but the boatmaker George Pocock. He followed in his father’s footsteps, but emigrated from England. While he would make shells for almost every collegiate team, his studio was the University of Washington shell house. His opinion and judgment was valued by coach Al Ulbrikson and the boys.

Brown does a tremendous job of presenting historical contexts, while also juxtaposing what was happening at the same time, sometimes on the same day, in Germany. Later, we will see the histories meet up in Berlin. His description of what the American Olympians see as their boat enters Germany, docks at Hamburg and while they are transported to Berlin, is chilling. You feel the tension and imagine the music as he describes the championship race and what the crew had to overcome and how much rested on the the coxswain Bobby Moch.

Brown introduces us to a time when rowing occupied the same stature in college athletics as football, drawing similar size crowds and attentive media coverage, including radio broadcasts of meets. On the East Coast, the powers were the privileged Ivy Leaguers. For Washington and its arch rival, the University of California, most of their oarsmen were working class young men – farmers, fishermen and loggers – who had worked hard digging themselves out of the Great Depression.

The book begins in 2007 when Brown first sits down to talk to 92-year old Joe Rantz about “the boat,” at the invitation of Joe’s daughter, Judy, months before Joe dies. That’s the last we see of that scene.

Joe is the main character, partly because of his daughter’s initiative, but because his story is the most intriguing. He was the one who had to overcome the most in his life.

He had a childhood no one would envy. His mother died when he was young. His father remarried. In a weird circumstance, he married the twin sister of the wife of Joe’s older brother . She was destined to become a famous violinist, but instead bore Harry Rantz’s children and lived in Hoovervilles. In Idaho, Thula forces young Joe to go live above the school. In Sequim, Washington, the family picks up and leaves 15-year old, Joe, living on his own. This built independence in Joe, but also scarred him. He believed he had to do everything for himself and could not trust others.

Except in Sequim, he meets Joyce, who would be his life-long companion, and UW crew coach Al Ulbrikson saw Joe working out in the high school gym and handed Joe his card.

Joe had never rowed before, but he makes the freshman boat in the 1933-34 season. It wins the freshmen national championship in Poughkeepsie, NY (they traveled by train from Seattle each spring). This sets the stage for 1936, as Ulbrikson, a Husky national champion in 1924 and 1926, doesn’t hide that he wants to get gold at Berlin, but who will be on that team and how they get to Berlin occupies the next two years.

There was one historical juxtaposition that intrigued me. Joe spends a summer working on the Grand Coulee Dam, a program of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, with teammates Day and White. Brown then describes how Hitler put young men to work building the Olympic venues. We get a look at two different leaders pulling their countries out of the Depression, for which they were admired by the people in their country.

Brown provides a tremendous amount of detail from the weather on certain days to what the boys were thinking. Joe and Joyce shared a lot with their five children and the families provided a lot of material, including journals. Brown did a tremendous amount of research as evidenced by the epilogue and chapter notes.

Review #4

Audio The Boys in the Boat narrated by Edward Herrmann

Enjoyed the core of the story, essentially the true tale of Joe Rantz, who endured growing up in the US Pacific North West, in the aftermath of WW1 and the Great Depression, to claw his way into University and the rowing team, and – right place, right time – become one of the US rowing eight which struck gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Along the way Jo learns the life lesson of trusting your friends and colleagues to achieve greatness through collaborative venture, and carried off his childhood sweetheart, Joyce Simdars. Joyce, though never touching an oar, so to speak, was a heroine of at least equal measure, overcoming poverty and disappointment, and … well … being a woman, got to University as well, and became Joes life partner to wonderful effect.

So far, so good, what I didn’t enjoy was the spurious attempt to shoehorn the Nazis, and their undoubted coup in extracting every atom of propaganda from their Olympics, as the key counterpoint to the story. The truth being, that Nazism barely impinged on Jo and the rowers’ preparation and performance in the race, and made the book overwritten, repetitive, clunky and trite – and about 200 pages too long. Never mind, I eventually learned to skim or skip most of that.

Review #5

Free audio The Boys in the Boat – in the audio player below

I found this a very enjoyable account of the medal-winning rowing eight in the 1936 Olympics, from their arrival as Freshmen at college in the Autumn of 1932 through to the event itself and immediate aftermath. As someone who both rowed and coxed at college, I enjoyed all the lengthy descriptions of technique and outings but I suspect non-rowers may find that aspect a bit over-done. However, the book is well structured, tells an interesting true story and, on the whole, is very well-written although DJB does have a tendency to over-write at times. Everything needs at least three adjectives to describe it, every hat is worn at a ‘jaunty angle’, every dress ‘summery and floral’, every jumper ‘worn and threadbare’ (the poor Westerners) or ’emblazoned with a crest’ (the rich East Coast boys) and so on. There is a fine line between being descriptive and stating the blinking obvious and when we hear about people ‘attacking steaks with knives and forks’ you are ready to scream ‘Really??? Not machetes and whale harpoons?’ Apart from that, it is a compelling tale and the interweaving of the parallel events unfolding in Nazi Germany is very well executed. Rowers will love it. Sports fans or anyone who likes a true story of underdogs triumphing will like it a lot.

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