THE BOYS IN THE BOAT, by Daniel James Brown

Brown’s robust book tells the irresistible story of the University of Washington’s rowing team and their epic quest for a gold medal in the 1936 Olympics. I must admit that, before starting on the book, I was a little skeptical, primarily because I didn’t think there was much to rowing—a little arm exercise pretty much summed it up for me. You know what Mark Twain said about golf—a good walk ruined.  Well, I thought rowing was a good paddle ruined…

And, while the book itself could be a little plodding early on, perhaps providing too much detail for me, I did come to enjoy it very much, particularly when Brown described an early race, I could feel the splash of the oars. More important, perhaps, I learned that rowing is a very complicated, precise, and interesting sport that, contrary to my previous view, uses practically every muscle. It became clear that readers do not need an interest in competitive rowing to be captivated by this remarkably crafted history.

Brown offers a vivid picture of the relentlessly demanding effort of the rowers and the precision that goes into the making of a first-class boat. Mentored not just by visionary Coach Al Ulbrickson, but by the genius of eccentric boat-builder George Pocock, the teammates learned to trust themselves and to row with grace, unmatched precision, and power. Their collective result was perfection, as was the book by Brown.

At the heart of the book is a heart-warming story of Joe Rantz, who was abandoned by his father -- left to fend for himself at a very young age, but who as a resourceful teenager won back his dignity to become an ideal hero by employing his determination to overcome the odds. Neither he, nor his team was ever expected to defeat the elite teams on the east coast, nor to have the opportunity to go on to shock the world by defeating the Germans in front of Adolf Hitler.

More than just a sports story, Boys in the Boat is a fascinating work of history. The reader gets a vivid picture of the depression era, the building of the Grand Coulee dam (where Joe worked during the summer to earn tuition money), the dust bowl, Hitler’s rise to power—all culminating in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. I was reminded somewhat of Bill Bryson’s One Summer, which similarly covered a variety of momentous events during the summer of 1927.

I also enjoyed reading about Leni Riefenstahl, the genius who directed Hitler’s propaganda films for the world, Triumph of the Will and Olympia, which won many awards. And I really enjoyed the conversations our book club had over a three-week period. I believe we all came away with a deep appreciation for the sport, and Karen Lynch’s added perspective as a coxswain for and member of the University of Iowa rowing team put the icing on the cake. 

“Harmony, balance, rhythm; A symphony of motion,” said the legendary designer of racing shells George Pocock. “There you have it. That’s what life is all about.” And that’s what this book is all about.—Ken Johnson 

NOTE: An episode of PBS's American Experience was based on the book, titled The Boys of '36. You can livestream it through them or Netflix.

The Songcatcher, by Sharyn McCrumb

                                                   

“And  where she’s been and what she’s seen, 

     no living soul may know, 

And when she’s come back home, 

     she will be changed—oh!”

"The Rowan Stave” Ballad

  

Lark McCourry is a popular folk singer whose tours regularly take her across the country.  But her roots and strong family ties are in the small town in the mountains of North Carolina where she grew up and learned to love folk music, especially ballads— and most especially The Rowan Stave ballad.  Lark moved from the mountains to the big cities to build her singing career.  But she continues to be haunted by the memory of the The Rowan Stave ballad.  She knows the song has been in her family for generations and finally feels compelled to leave her singing tour and travel back to the mountains to begin her journey to find it and restore a piece of her family’s past.  Her quest leads her to her estranged father, now a lonely and angry old man living alone, and dying, in the North Carolina mountains. 

She also meets Nora Bonesteel, a wise mountain woman who talks to both the living and the dead, and who may be able to help with Lark’s search.  Nora believes that old, lost songs are a touchstone to the past, and so is eager to help Lark.

Songcatcher is the story of Lark’s journey.  But it also is the story of the lyrical, haunting ballad that has woven its way through generations, across oceans and mountains, from Scotland and Ireland and England to the hill country of North Carolina.

The first settlers in the North Carolina mountains brought the folk songs they’d sung in their homeland with them to their new home and sung them to their children, then to their grandchildren and great grandchildren.

The ballad was first heard in 1759 by a nine-year-old boy after he was kidnapped from the shores of his home in Scotland and taken aboard an English ship as a slave.  His name was Malcolm McCourry and during his 10 years on the ship, of all the songs he heard sung or played by his captors, “The Rowan Stave” ballad was the one he liked best.  The “strange and terrible” story in the ballad haunted him and also reminded him of home. He learned it by heart and for many years taught it to others he met on his travels.

Malcom’s other remembrance of home was the small white pebble, the “magic rock,” his mother gave him when he was just a toddler to keep him safe from drowning, a fear she’d had since a “wise woman” terrified her with a prophesy when Malcolm was born that “The sea will take him.”  He kept the small rock safe during all the years he traveled. 

But when he lost his “magic” rock, he was afraid to sail without its protection.  So he jumped ship and settled in Morristown, New Jersey because he liked the “little village.”  The song went with him when he apprenticed with an attorney, became an attorney himself, and married Rachel, the daughter of the attorney who had befriended him.  It was with him when he fought bravely in the American Revolutionary War, and came home suffering from serious wounds and exhaustion.  He sang the song to his wife, then to his young son, Zebulon.   

Tragically Malcolms son, Zebulon, was left an orphan after both Malcolm and Rachel died of Typhoid Fever, leaving their baby son to be raised by an uncle on his farm. Young Zeb enjoyed entertaining visitors to his village with ballads he’d learned, especially his favorite, “The Rowan Stave.” 

As time went on, the ballad was shared with sons and siblings, with children and grandchildren, then continued to weave its way through generations, becoming a part of McCourry family history.

But as families grew and spread from the mountains to the and farms and small towns across the country, this ballad and other ballads and old songs— beautiful songs telling wonderful stories— began to be forgotten, replaced by new songs played in music halls and concert houses.  But the old songs were not lost to those who settled in the North Carolina mountains.  They had brought the music with them in their heads. Music was an important and constant part of their lives. And there were no concert houses or music halls in the mountains to introduce the new and different music to them.

As we follow Lark’s journey to find the ballad and her family’s legacy we learn the colorful, intriguing stories of other McCourry family members and how their lives impact each other. 

Author McCrumb is a master storyteller knitting the fascinating stories of the McCourry family together with the history of The Rowan Stave ballad and other songs carried across oceans and mountains. It’s a book that held my interest and imagination from beginning to end!

P.S.  In her notes, author Sharyn McCrumb shares with us the surprising and wonderful fact that Malcolm McCourry is the author’s “four-times great grandfather.” —Gail Stilwill

One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson

In One Summer: America, 1927, Bill Bryson—a prodigious researcher and a talented storyteller—takes us on a meandering journey through four months in a pivotal American year. He starts with the devastating Mississippi flood, pauses to introduce us to Charles Lindbergh and then interrupts that with a story about Babe Ruth, then it’s on to Henry Ford, Calvin Coolidge, Al Capone, Al Jolson, Sacco and Vanzetti, Gene Tunney, and a batch of lesser characters.

He weaves these stories into a narrative that is hilarious, fascinating, frustrating, terrifying, and educational.

Apparently women weren’t yet invented, because Bryson introduces us to only a few—the notorious Ruth Snyder who conspired with her lover to kill her husband, Warren Harding’s wife who may or may not have poisoned him but who nevertheless refused to allow his body to be autopsied, and Clara Bow, the silent movie star and original “It” girl whose career nosedived because her nasal voice was too jarring to withstand the talkies.

That aside, this book is a delight. Bryson’s style is delicious and the details he shares are compelling and often bizarre. A few examples:

• President Coolidge reportedly worked an average of only four hours a day, napped more than any other president, and took three months off to live in South Dakota where he play-acted as a cowboy, complete with oversized hat and chaps. While he was there, he gave the nod to the creation of Mount Rushmore.

• Men apparently urinated wherever with startling abandon. President Warren Harding was reported to urinate in the White House fireplace. And Al Jolson, star of The Jazz Singer, urinated on people as some sort of joke. Bryson notes that this could explain why he had four wives and few friends. Why he had any of either is surprising.

• Hordes of people—tens of thousands—congregated wherever Lindbergh landed and overwhelmed him so much that he occasionally avoided them by coasting for extended periods at 30 feet above what might well have been terrified farmers and their cows. One measure of the size of his following: the ticker-tape parade thrown for him in Manhattan in 1927 generated 1,800 tons of debris. In contrast, the armistice parade of 1918 created a paltry 155 tons.

• “There was almost nothing Henry Ford did that didn’t have some bad in it somewhere,” Bryson writes. Case in point: his "Fordlandia" settlement in Brazil, an Americanized city plopped down into the rain forest, with cozy frame houses, a Main Street, and paved avenues that dead-ended in the jungle on all sides. Not surprisingly, it was a flop.

• The wonderfully-named Philo Farnsworth may actually have invented the television but the idea was stolen, which made him so mad "even his hair looked angry.”

• The Mississippi flood covered 16.5 million acres and cost more 1,000 lives. The human loss was “perhaps several times that,” Bryson cynically writes, but those counting “weren’t more scrupulous because, alas, so many of the victims were poor and black.”

• Bryson calls this time period “the Age of Loathing,” noting, “There may never have been another time in the nation’s history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason.” For example, Ku Klux Klan groups formed throughout the country and were full of community “leaders” opposed to Catholics, Jews, Italians, and most other “foreigners.” And the pseudoscience of eugenics was backed by top scholars, physicians, politicians, and the Supreme Court, which upheld the “right” of states to forcibly sterilize tens of thousands of Americans, considered “imbeciles” and expendable. Most at risk were the poor and unmarried women.

• Xenophobia was literally the law of the land. “Iowa, to be on the safe side, outlawed conversations in any language other than English in schools, at church, or even over the telephone,” he writes. “When people protested that they would have to give up church services in their own languages, Governor William L. Harding responded: ‘There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English. God is listening only to the English tongue.’”

• The Federal Reserve, supported by four odd ducks from the United States, England, France, and Germany, met and, with the best of intentions, set the stage for the Great Depression in 1929.

• Railroads were sometimes built with little rhyme or reason. Bryson writes about one such line, the Pere Marquette, which “wandered confusedly around the upper Midwest, as if looking for a lost item.” And he offers a more general point about our fond memories of railroads: “The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.”

• When Babe Ruth was seven, his father, knowing he did not have the resources to raise him properly, dropped him off at St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. Without this, he might have had no career. One of the Brothers at the school was an avid baseball fan, and his coaching got Ruth started on the sport. By 19, he was playing professionally, first as a pitcher and ultimately as a hitter. He was a remarkable athlete but a dazzlingly uncouth person.

• For book lovers, this could have been the Good Old Days. “The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life,” Bryson writes. “Each year, American publishers produced 110 million books, more than 10,000 separate titles, double the number of ten years before. For those who felt daunted by such a welter of literary possibility, a helpful new phenomenon, the book club, had just made its debut. The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 and was followed the next year by the Literary Guild.”

Bryson, our hometown talent, is a treasure. Few writers could take all this data and turn it into such a captivating maze of mesmerizing tales. Fewer still would do the type of research that gives the stories credence. —PEP

Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

“Prodigal” is from the Latin prodigus – meaning “lavish.” Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer is a lavish story. The characters, in their slightly over-the-top ways, are lavish. Even the cover design is lavish.

The novel cycles through three stories, all set in fictional Zebulon County, near the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. There’s the story of Deanna Wolfe and Eddie Bondo and their passion for each other–their relationship stressed by her resolve to save the coyotes and his quest to kill them. There’s the story of Lusa and Cole Widener–their relationship strained by opposite views of how to husband the land. And there’s the story of Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley–he a conservative curmudgeon who would like to deny feelings, she a happy and generous soul who welcomes change.

Each of the three stories has a distinct narrative voice. For fun, I randomly opened the book to sample each one.

From Deanna’s story: She went to bed with Eddie Bondo all over her mind and got up with a government-issue pistol tucked in her belt.

From Lusa’s story: . . . when she married Cole and moved her life into this house, the inhalations of Zebulon Mountain touched her face all morning, and finally she understood. She learned to tell time with her skin, as morning turned to afternoon and the mountain’s breath began to bear gently on the back of her neck. By early evening it was insistent as a lover’s sigh, sweetened by the damp woods, cooling her nape and shoulders whenever she paused her work in the kitchen to lift her sweat-damp curls off her neck.

From Garnett’s story: In a springtime as rainy as this one, snapping turtles strayed from their home ponds into wet ditches, looking for new places to find their hideous mates and breed their hideous children. Of course there would be one waiting for him in that weedy ditch under all those briars – that swamp that had been created by Nannie Rawley – and if he happened to have a turtle on his foot now, it was entirely her fault.

Kingsolver creates discrete syntax, vocabulary, and tone for each of the three narrators so that their voices reveal their characters: Deanna’s voice is terse, literal, and solitary. Lusa’s emotional, romantic, and sensual. Garnett’s pessimistic and lonely.

The couples are contradictions, which Kingsolver connects with and instead of the customary but. Deanna wants to live alone with nature, and she’s sexually drawn to a coyote hunter. Lusa wants to cherish and preserve nature, and she’s sexually drawn to a conventional tobacco farmer. Garnett wants to be dismissive of all Nannie’s hippie ways, and he wants to slay her scarecrow to protect her.

The characters of Prodigal Summer will stay in my mind for a long time because they are lavishly made and lavishly thrown together. I find myself wondering how Deanna’s baby is being loved in Nannie’s patch of paradise, if Garnett has loosened up a little, where Lusa will get her next bright idea for making the Weidener farm profitable.

The last narrator in the novel is a coyote, meditating on the foolishness of people. Solitude is a human presumption. Every step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen. —Sharelle Moranville

The Color of Water, by James McBride

The Color of Water is a success story, a testament to one woman’s true heart, solid values, and indomitable will.  The story is told in two voices which alternate throughout the book. In telling his mother’s story, along with his, James McBride addresses racial identity with compassion, insight, and realism. It is, in a word, inspiring.  

McBride, a journalist and musician, explores his mother’s past, recreating her remarkable story, as well as his own upbringing and heritage in a poignant and powerful debut novel. He skillfully relates his life story and his coming to terms with his mixed ethnic and religious heritage, with chapters conveying his mother’s travails and development into a fervent Baptist.

His mother, born Rachel Shilsky, who changed her name to Ruth to be more American, is a story of a woman whose parents fled the anti-Jewish pogroms of Central Europe and landed in a Suffolk, Virginia, a violently racist small southern town, there to be faced by new anti-Semitism and racial prejudices and develop a few of their own.  Her father, rabbi turned storekeeper, was a cold, sexually abusive tyrant who kept his children in virtual servitude, exploited his black customers, and ultimately abandoned his wife.

However, her grim upbringing is left behind when she moves to Harlem, marries Dennis, a black minister, fervently adopts Christianity, and raises eight children. When she fell in love with Dennis, she said “He came from a home where kindness was a way of life.  I wanted to be in this kind of family.  I was proud to join it, and they were happy to have me.” However, they experienced a certain degree of prejudice as a result of their interracial marriage.  They opened the New Brown Memorial Church together.  Then Dennis fell ill with lung cancer and died just before James was born.

Widowed, alone and poor, she struggled fiercely to raise her family. Then she remarried to Andrew McBride, another black man, and raised four more children before he also died.

James reports that he grew up in “orchestrated chaos”, with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. As a child, he became aware that his mother was different from others around him.  She was white, and she kept secrets. It is her voice, unique, incisive, at once unsparing and ironic, that is dominant in this paired history, and its richest contribution.

In the answer that gives the book’s its title, she says “God’s not black. He’s not white.  God is the color of water.  Water doesn’t have a color.” She schemed shrewdly to have all her children buses to schools predominately in Jewish neighborhoods, sure that learning was a priority there.  James was pleasantly surprised when he learned during his senior year in high school that he had been admitted to Oberlin College.  He and his eleven siblings all completed college and led successful careers.

The triumph of the book is that race and religion are transcended in these interwoven histories of family love, the sheer force of a mother’s will and her unshakable insistence that only two things really mattered: school and church, a respect for education and religion. Issues of race and identity took secondary importance to her beliefs.

At 65, Ruth went back to school and earned a college degree in social work.  She remains in close contact with her children, holding holiday gatherings where everyone sleeps on the floor or rugs in shifts, double or triple in bed – just like the old times.

The Color of Water will make you proud to be a member of the human race. This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths.  The two stories, son’s and mother’s, beautifully juxtaposed, strike a graceful note, particularly at this current time of racial polarization.—Kenneth N. Johnson

Our Souls at Night, by Kent Haruf

Kent Haruf was a gentle, tranquil writer, and his voice is solid in this bittersweet story of last love.

Addie and Louis have lived near one another in Holt, Colorado—on the eastern plains—for years. They have never been close friends, but they have followed each other’s lives peripherally. Both widowed, they’ve lived parallel, but not intersected lives.

Now, Addie, 70, is tired of being alone, especially at night, and she approaches Louis with an offer: that they spend the nights together. This isn’t about sex or romance; it’s about companionship, about being with another person in the night and waking up together. At first, Louis is wary, but then he realizes he, too, needs more human contact.

They talk into the night, wiping away their loneliness, and shrug off any opposition. And from this, a sweet end-of-life love develops.

As the bond between the two grows, Addie’s son and Louis’s daughter are unsure what to make of the relationship and the rest of the town reacts with various levels of acceptance.

Reading Haruf feels like a hug. Here’s Louis talking:

I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.

Adding to the sweet sorrow of the book is the fact that Haruf wrote it while he knew he was dying—the book was published after his death from lung cancer at 71, around the age of his characters. He knew how it felt to face death close up.

The book is also a Netflix movie starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, filmed last year in Colorado Springs and Florence, Colorado, where Haruf spent his final years. He was born in my hometown of Pueblo, Colorado and was my age, so we probably met in the maternity ward.—Pat Prijatel

Dear Life, by Alice Munro

Novels have an architecture readers expect. The arc. A beginning, a middle of rising action, a climax of peak intensity, and action falling to a satisfying end.

Many short stories have that same architecture, but Munro’s don’t. Her architecture is like a chocolate covered cherry (messy to eat, rich, with a lingering aftertaste. Not to be eaten by the handful).

Think of the chocolate shell as the narration that swirls around, accessing the thoughts of multiple characters in a single story, and folding back and forth from past to present to past. Think of the creamy cordial inside as the life of southwestern Ontario where Munro lives – forests and lakes, farms, small towns, distances covered by trains, cities. Characters she knew or imagined. Think of the cherry as the treasure – the Ah ha! moment, cradled gently by the cordial and given shape by the chocolate shell.

The Ah ha! moment happens to the reader as it happens to the character. For example, in “Corrie,” the main character, wealthy Corrie Carlton, attends the funeral of a woman, Lillian Wolfe, who worked in the village years ago. Indeed, she worked briefly in the Carlton household and subsequently found a way to blackmail Corrie and her married lover. When Corrie gets trapped into attending Lillian’s funeral reception, she is unsettled by the universal affection in which Lillian is held. The next morning, Corrie wakes up recognizing she has been ensnared for years in the most outrageous lie. As this awful moment of awareness comes to Corrie, a gut feeling of recognition and identification also comes to the reader. (“There’s always one morning when you realize that the birds have all gone. She knows something. She has found it in her sleep.”) And the reader has bitten into the cherry.

Likewise, at the end of “Gravel”, neither the genderless narrator nor the reader knows what really took place that dreadful day when Caro and Blitzee drowned. But Munro has stroked the universal cloudiness of early childhood memories and stirred unease and guilt in the reader.

In these rich, evocative, stories that are as packed with meaning as a novel, Munro revels in the ordinary: her own time and place. She writes about soldiers returning home after World War II (“Train”). She writes about the closing of factories and shifts in the class system (“Pride). She shows us the perfect post-war wife – rigid in housekeeping, wanton in bed (“Haven”). She writes about the sexual revolution and its effect on children (“To Reach Japan”). She writes about drugs, divorce, the fragility of the family, and growing old.

Munro’s characters are never totally worthy. Some are selfish (the mothers in “To Reach Japan” and “Gravel”). Some are exploitative (the gigolo in “Corrie”). Some can’t bond (the narrator in “Train”). Some are irresponsible (Neal in “Gravel”). Munro seems to understand the condition of being broken, and the need to forgive. Even ourselves.

At the end of the last not-quite story, “Dear Life,” Munro confesses guilt for not returning home for her mother’s last illness or funeral. She writes, “We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.”

These are the closing words in the closing book of a long, distinguished, Nobel Prize winning career. The ten stories and four almost-stories are told as only Munro could tell them. They are a celebration of dear life and an affirmation of our common humanity.   SBM