The Boys In the Boat by Daniel James Brown highlighted the tough upbringing of Joe Rantz and the University of Washington’s unexpected gold medal win in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The story is told by Rantz himself who met which Daniel James Brown to tell the story that not enough people had heard. The book had a great way of showing how Joe’s hardworking mentality from a young age proved to be a huge part in him sticking to rowing. When he began living in the schoolhouse, it was his job to chop enough wood to keep the fireplace running. Later in the book, it is noted that the first people to quit rowing at the university were the rich kids who weren’t used to the physical and mental strength that rowing required. This was not an issue with Joe because of his days growing up at the schoolhouse always chopping wood. Rantz later found out that the other rowers also had tough childhoods and they weren’t the rich boys he though they were. Therefore, …show more content…
Not only was it sports, it also talked about the Nazi control at the time and how the Olympics in Berlin could prove to the world that they are a superpower. Also, I had already read The Blind Side which would have been my first choice. This book took me 3 days to read and while most books are usually a drag this book didn’t have a stretch of pages that were super boring so it was easier to read. There were certain words and descriptions that were more challenging to understand but the book as a whole was relatively easy to read. I would certainly recommend this book to everyone. Even if someone is not a sports fan, the book is so much more than just the sport of rowing. It is the journey that the team went through and how they beat all odds. The superpower at the time and the obvious favorite, Germany, had the race won until out of nowhere popped the U.S boat to capture Olympic Gold at the 1936 Summer
Don’t you wish you could go back in time to change those bad memories? That’s what Lionel Sherbousekis going through in a short story called “Goin’ Fishin’”. Chris Crutcher wrote Athletic Shorts and the story “Goin’ Fishin’” is about a boy whose father loved fishing and while their family was fishing one day a boat full of drunk kids smashing into them but Lionel luckily save the boat before it hit and jumped off. This is what the main character in “Goin Fishin” was feeling when his family died in a boating accident.
Little Brown Baby by Paul Laurence Dunbar Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of the most influential African American poets to gain a nationwide reputation. Dunbar the son of two former slaves; was born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio. His work is truly one of a kind, known for its rich, colorful language, encompassed by the use of dialect, a conversational tune, and a brilliant rhetorical structure. The style of Dunbar’s poetry includes two distinct voices; the standard English of the classical poet and the evocative dialect of the turn of the century black community in America. His works include
In the book “The Boys of Winter” by Wayne Coffey, shows the struggle of picking the twenty men to go to Lake Placid to play in the 1980 Olympics and compete for the gold medal. Throughout this book Wayne Coffey talks about three many points. The draft and training, the importance of the semi-final game, and the celebration of the gold medal by the support the team got when they got home.
when selecting the rowers should have taken into consideration both the psychological (personality types and traits) and the physical aspects (strength, speed, stamina, & coordination) and experimented the results of various combinations by mixing these aspects. He should have identified the growing internal conflicts and tried to look into the matter in the initial stages. Coach P from the beginning has focused on ascertaining his belief whether the Varsity team he chose is highly competent or not. Quantitatively, the members were highly competent in their individual abilities. Coach P. had several opportunities to counter this during the Atlanta Retreat. However, he failed to take actions on their failure as a team and waited to resolve it only in the end, just three days before the national games. The Army Varsity Crew is a dysfunctional group. They’ve not yet reached the Norming phase where trust among the members has largely been achieved. The coach should have made sure the structure and composition of the teams were properly made long before the seat races have started. The lack of presence of strong motivator in the Varsity team should have been met to give them a
A prevailing theme that is present in The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown is the idea of grit. Grit is the mental toughness and firmness of mind and spirit; it is also the courage and resolve of character. The theme of grit evolves and unfolds throughout the entirety of the book. From the beginning, Joe has had to persevere through rough child hood, barely scraping by and each day strengthening himself to be more self-reliant. During school, Joe was required to change himself in order to better himself and the team. He was driven to be the best that he could; and maybe one day, he could finally fill the void left by his father. Whether it be his childhood, college, or the Berlin games, Joe had to fight through and toughen his mind
reacts to the crosser. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker’s first impression of the swamp
The Boys in the Boat has a shared dream of winning gold in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but not just the gold, it is the overall satisfaction of achieving something greater than ever imagined. Many of these boys
I chose this particular book because I am a huge basketball fan and I have always been intrigued by street basketball. I was also very interested in this book because I have lived in the inner-city for brief periods of time so I could somewhat understand some of the things that went on throughout the book. This book also gives great insight into the relationship between sports and society and how the two are closely related.
The controversy in Berlin Olympic Games was that the some of the Jews excluded from the Olympic team were actually world class athletes. The athletes left Germany, along with other Jewish athletes, to resume their sports careers abroad.The Nazis also disqualified Gypsies.The Olympics were intended to be an exercise in goodwill among all nations emphasizing racial equality in the area of sports competition. But the Nazis thought that only the Aryans should participate in the Olympics games to represent Germany.Then after that controversy then the committee of the Games wanted to move the Olympic Games to another country.This was because usually the U.S. got the most medals because they sent the most athletes.
Cheever, John. “The Swimmer”. Short Fiction: Classic and Contemporary. 6th ed. Ed. Charles Bohner and Lyman Grant. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2006.
Theme: Many events of The Nazi Olympics surround this sporting festival to make it one of the controversial events in sport history. Not only does Mandell cover the 1936 Olympic Games themselves but he gives insight to the history of the modern games, participation by the United States, the role of the games in the Nazi propaganda efforts and portrays heroes and key figures. Mandell wrote about the intersection of sport and politics and how world leaders set the agenda, not the athletes. The Nazi’s used the 1936 Olympic Games as a way to reinforce their political and racial goals. Although they were founded as part of a vision of world peace, the 1936 games became a stage for political disputes. The Nazi Olympics takes an in depth look at the efforts the Germans made to show the rest of the world that they had again become a powerful nation under the leader of Adolf Hitler. The events that followed the games in Germany, mainly the Holocaust and World War II overshadowed the Berlin games. However, it is very important to note that a world gathering like the Olympics took place in a country that was in the process of eliminating an entire race of people. The games were a huge success in regards to the Nazi regime, they were able to fool the world and prove to Germany that they were a peaceful and stable nation.
Bachrach, Susan D. The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936 Boston, MA : Little, Brown and Company, 2000
“The Boat”, narrated by a Mid-western university professor, Alistar MacLeod, is a short story concerning a family and their different perspectives on freedom vs. tradition. The mother pushes the son to embrace more of a traditional lifestyle by taking over the fathers fishing business, while on the other hand the father pushes the son to live more autonomously in an unconstrained manner. “The Boat” focuses on the father and how his personality influences the son’s choice on how to live and how to make decisions that will ultimately affect his life. In Alistair MacLeod’s, “The Boat”, MacLeod suggest that although dreams and desires give people purpose, the nobility of accepting a life of discontentment out weighs the selfishness of following ones own true desires. In the story, the father is obligated to provide for his family as well as to continue the fishing tradition that was inherited from his own father. The mother emphasizes the boat and it’s significance when she consistently asked the father “ How did things go in the boat today” since tradition was paramount to the mother. H...
Many times when reading a novel, the reader connects with one of the characters and begins to sympathize with them. This could be because the reader understands what the character is going through or because we get to see things from the character’s perspective and their emotions and that in return allows a bond to form for the reader. The character that is the most intriguing for me and the one I found comparing to every book that I read during school was Stacey from the book “Ravensong” Lee Maracle. The character Stacey goes through a lot of internal battle with herself and it’s on her path to discovery that she begins to understand herself and what she’s capable of. Throughout the novel, Stacey has a few issues she tries to work through. This is emphasized through her village and in her school that is located across the bridge in white town. Stacey begins dealing with the loss of Nora, and elder in her town. And this in return begins the chain of events that Stacey begins on the path of self-discovery not only on herself but everyone around her. She begins to see things differently and clearly. Stacey is a very complex and confused character, and she begins to work through these complexities through her thoughts, statements and actions.
“Black Power”, the word alone raises an abundance of controversial issues. Black power was a civil rights movement led by the black panthers which addressed several issues including segregation and racism. Black power had a different meaning to every member of the Mc Bride family, Ruth and James both looked at black power from a different angle. In “The Color of Water”, The author James Mc Bride admired the black panthers at first, but slowly he grew afraid of them after fearing the consequences his mother might face for being a white woman in a black community influenced by black power. James’ worries were baseless, black power’s motive was to educate and improve African American communities not to create havoc or to harm members of the white community.