The Boys in the Boat

My book group read this while I was in Italy but friend, Anne Zald, had sent it to me and I still wanted to read it. Wow! What a compelling account that made it hard to put down, even though I already knew how it ended. This is an arcing narrative leading to the University of Washington's 8 man crew going to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and, against all odds, winning the gold medal.
Along the way we follow mainly one of the ultimate crew members, Joe Rantz, who came from a tumultuous childhood. Often living in poverty, abandoned by his father and family several times, he nevertheless had the determination to survive, scrape together a living, and put himself through 4 years of engineering school at the UW. And he married his high school sweetheart and raised a family. Really a remarkable man. But then they all were. The training schedule endured by these young men was simply torturous and author, Daniel James Brown, makes the reader feel every freezing, painful, exhilarating moment of those times. I can't recommend this book highly enough. Great story, very competent writing, and inspirational.

Flight from Berlin

This historical novel set during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin is the first novel from David John. It revolves around fictionalized versions of real people including:

• Eleanor Holm (Eleanor Emerson character) who was on the US swim team but was thrown off by Avery Brundage for partying too hard on the ship journey to Europe. Some of the story line surrounding Eleanor ( a main character) is true, some is not, and John gives that information in notes following the text.
• Helene Mayer (Hannah Liebermann) was the only "non-Aryan" athlete who competed for Germany (fencing). Much of the suspense in the story is generated by this fictionalized account of what happened to her during and after the Olympics.
• Avery Brundage as himself, head of the American Olympic Committee and later the U.S. member and then president of the IOC, in spite of his pro-Nazi and probably anti-Semitic views and behaviors.
• Martha Dodd as herself, the daughter of Ambassador William E. Dodd (see my blog on In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson). 
• Dr. Hugo Eckener as himself, the moving force behind the giant zeppelins, Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg. 
• Several actual Olympic athletes, journalists and high-profile personalities who attended the games, and several prominent members of the Nazi Party.

The protagonist, Richard Denham, is a German-based British journalist who has already received several warnings from the Nazi Party to start shedding a more favorable light on their activities or he might just disappear. He is nevertheless determined to reveal the games as a grand cover-up of the brutality and persecution that is rapidly escalating in Germany. When Eleanor is kicked off the Olympic team and is taken in by the cadre of international journalists, she and Richard team up in a deadly game of cat and mouse as they try to find a secret file that will discredit Hitler in the eyes of the world, and to help Hannah, the German Jewish fencer, and her family escape imprisonment and possible death at the hands of the Reich.
All the things you want in good historical fiction are here: well-developed characters, well-written and compelling storyline, notes on the background research. Recommended, especially in combination with Larson's non-fiction account of an overlapping time period in Berlin.