Oreo Book Club – The Boys in the Boat by Daniel Jones Brown

We reviewed the book The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel Jones Brown at the home of Norton Schwartz, who provided Oreo cookies on the proviso that he be nominated to lead the discussion. The Boys were the eight-man rowing crew of the University of Washington who, in spite of the hardships of the depression in 1933, were able to learn trust in each other and perform on a level to best the crews from the elite Universities of Berkley, Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford.
Ultimately, in the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, they beat the best crews in the world. Their protests before the games about having them under Hitler’s aegis, but Avery Brundidge said those protestors were part of a Jewish-Communist plot to stop the games.

– Norton Schwartz

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