Prix remportés-

• Notable Children's Recordings
  Association for Library Service to Children

Extraits-

• From the cover

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

  Ever since The Boys in the Boat was first published, I have been traveling around the country talking to people about the story. When I first started, I quickly noticed that most of the people in my audiences were quite old. Some of them, in fact, were old enough to remember the events at the heart of the story, even though those events took place almost eighty years ago.

  But lately something interesting has begun to happen. More and more young people have begun to show up at my book talks. Often these younger people join with the older people, coming up to the front of the room to have their books signed. Frequently they pause at the signing table just to tell me how much they enjoyed the story and what it means to them personally. It sometimes seems strange to me to have a ninety-year-old grandma and a twelve-year-old student standing next to each other in front of me at the signing table. But listening to what both groups of readers have to say about the story, I have begun to understand. Some things are timeless.

  At first glance, this may seem to be a story about a time and place that is very different from the time and place you live in. After all, the young men at the center of this story dressed very differently than you and your friends do. They talked differently. They drove cars that look now as if they belong in museums. They sang songs that sound corny to our modern ears. They thought a radio was a marvel of modern technology. They lived through world events that now seem almost like ancient history.

  But here’s the thing. The boys in the boat were just that: boys. The problems they wrestled with were the same that you and your friends likely wrestle with today: family problems, making the team, succeeding at school, fitting in with other kids, learning whom you can and can’t trust, finding a way to make some money, figuring out how you feel about the opposite sex, deciding who and what you want to be a few years down the road. Under the surface, they really weren’t all that different.

  None of that, though, is really what the young people who come up to me at book events want to talk about. What they recognize in the story—and what they want to share with me—is the sheer excitement of being young, having a goal, striving to accomplish that goal, and making it happen, just as the boys in the boat did. Sometimes they talk about their volleyball team winning the regionals. Sometimes they talk about making first violin in the school orchestra. Sometimes they talk about wanting to be the first in their family to go to college. Sometimes they talk about falling short of their goal but being inspired by the book to try again.

  It is easy for those of us who are older and count ourselves wise to forget that it is the young who most often move the world forward. It is the young who have the boundless energy, passion, optimism, courage, and idealism to try to do what we elders might say is impossible. That’s what the boys in the boat attempted to do in this story. That’s why, eighty years later at my book-signing table, old men and women come to me with tears in their eyes, proudly remembering when they were young and full of fire. And it’s why standing right next to them are young men and women with beaming faces, bearing tales of their own brave attempts at the near impossible.

  So as you read this book, I hope you will keep in mind that at its heart this is a story about growing up, about...

Au sujet de l’auteur-

• Daniel James Brown is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Boys in the Boat, which won the ABA Nonfiction Book of the Year Award and the Washington State Book Award. His two previous nonfiction books, The Indifferent Stars Above and Under a Flaming Sky, were both finalists for the Washington State Book Award. He has taught writing at San Jose State University and Stanford University. He lives outside Seattle. You can learn more at danieljamesbrown.com. 

Critiques-

• As the University of Washington's crew team quests to represent the U.S. in the 1936 Olympics, narrator Mark Bramhall is rooting for Joe Rantz and his teammates with every stroke. Bramhall sets a steady pace and transitions smoothly from scenes of Joe's personal life to scenes with his team and his rowing coaches. As narrator, Bramhall precisely delivers the technical terms of rowing and calls each race with excitement. Bramhall's voice produces a range of tone--steely, tender, distant--as he recounts aspects of Joe's story: his determination to make the rowing team, his tenderness toward his half-siblings, his vulnerability at being abandoned by his father and stepfamily, his questioning of himself, and his aloofness in his interactions with teammates. What a crew and what life lessons! A.R. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
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  April 15, 2013
  Doughty rowers heave against hard times and Nazis in this rousing sports adventure. Brown (Under a Flaming Sky) follows the exploits of the University of Washington’s eight-man crew, whose national dynasty culminated in a gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Brown tells it as an all-American story of humble working-class boys squaring off against a series of increasingly odious class and political foes: their West Coast rivals at Berkeley; the East Coast snobs at the Poughkeepsie championship regatta; and ultimately the German team, backed by Goebbels and his sinisterly choreographed Olympic propaganda. The narrative’s affecting center is Joe Rantz, a young every-oarsman who wrestles with the psychic wounds inflicted on him by poverty and abandonment during the Great Depression. For this nautical version of Chariots of Fire, Brown crafts an evocative, cinematic prose (“their white blades flashed above the water like the wings of sea birds flying in formation”) studded with engrossing explanations of rowing technique and strategy, exciting come-from-behind race scenes, and the requisite hymns to “mystic bands of trust and affection” forged on the water. Brown lays on the aura of embattled national aspiration good and thick, but he makes his heroes’ struggle as fascinating as the best Olympic sagas. Photos. Agent: Dorian Karchman, WME.

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