I'm seriously considering tagging The Boys in the Boat with my "All-time Favorites" tag. I loved it that much.
The lazy way of describing this book (wI'm seriously considering tagging The Boys in the Boat with my "All-time Favorites" tag. I loved it that much.
The lazy way of describing this book (which I'm starting with; not sure what that says about me) is that it's one part Unbroken (action-packed, Olympian[s] on the brink of WWII, scrappy hero who'll win your heart), one part Miracle (that is, the movie about the underdog US Olympic hockey team during the Cold War) and one part In the Garden of Beasts (juxtaposing 1930s Germany/the Nazi regime history with a smaller, more humanized story). Whip all that up in the blender, and you get The Boys in the Boat.
Kind of.
The two books above were easily, easily five-star reviews for me, and I could watch Miracle seven thousand times without ever tiring of it, but to say this book is "just" an amalgam of those great things is like that experiment where they put celebrities' famous body parts together (Angeline Jolie's lips, Julia Roberts' smile, etc.) but instead of it being this otherworldly gorgeous being, it was like a creepy Frankenstein. In other words, it doesn't do it justice. It's excellent on its own, without comparisons to anything else, and if I weren't so lazy, I wouldn't have even brought them up in the first place.
Given the (justly deserved) uproar over Unbroken over the past year or two and over everything Erik Larson has written ever, I'm surprised I haven't heard more chatter about this book and its author. Like those two authors, Brown is both an incredible writer and an incredible researcher, which when compiling books of this magnitude is essential. The book never gets stuck in weighty, dense facts, though - you'll fly through the pages effortlessly, if necessary staying up all night, flashlight-under-the-covers style to finish it. Brown is a hybrid of a journalist, one who can enliven history while poking at your feels and inspiring you, and he deserves to be more widely read.
Nothing I say here about the book is going to make you read or not read it. As the subtitle says, it's about nine Americans and their epic quest for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. That, and so, so much more. ...more
Once, someone told me I was the most interested person alive. "Thank you!!" I told him, astonished that finally someone else realized what I've known Once, someone told me I was the most interested person alive. "Thank you!!" I told him, astonished that finally someone else realized what I've known all along - that the Dos Equis guy is lying. It is, in fact, I who am the most interesting person alive!*
"No, no - not interesting...interested," he said, shattering my dreams without even realizing it.
Shit. So much for that.
But then I thought about it, and being the most interested person alive is pretty cool, too. I can get sucked into ANYTHING because I am fascinated by EVERYTHING. I might be the only person on the planet who enjoyed Yann Martel's 14-page description of a pear in Beatrice and Virgil, and I have yet to encounter a subject that can't even pique my curiosity a little bit.
Soo, I felt pretty good when I started with Alexandra Horowitz's On Looking as I was anticipating having an obscure-fact party in my brain, but alas, there was no party to be had. Boo.
First off, the book is one giant LIE.
Okay so that may be a slightly extreme way of putting it, but I don't seem the be the only one who thought she would repeat the same walk with 11 different experts, thereby casting 11 different points of view on the same space. Wouldn't that have been infinitely more interesting?? (Spoiler alert: Yes.) I thought the entire point of the book is "look how much you're missing in everyday life" - so shouldn't these alleged** experts be able to illuminate one walk in 11 different ways? Oddly, some of the walks were in fact the same, whereas the others were in entirely different states. Huh?
There was also a problem of content. It often seemed the Horowitz didn't sponge enough information out of her experts to fill the whole book, so she resorted to bolstering each chapter with marginally relevant filler content. Example: In one chapter, she scours the streets with a doctor who's adept at diagnosing illness based on peculiarities of gait and appearance. Unfortunately, probably because people were bundled up against the cold and thereby hiding their sickly complexions from inspection, there were only about two people the doctor was able to size up on their walk. Rather than scrap that doctor idea and come up with a new expert to walk with, Horowitz is like, "hey guys, let me also tell you about this physical therapist I know from when my back was out, which I may have mentioned before because my back was out for like half of this project which probably was an ominous way to begin a book dependent upon my ability to walk but anyway this guy also knows some things about gaits, like let's see well usually you walk with your hips in synchronous rotation which thereby forces the legs forward via kinetic propulsion [yes, I made that up] and...what was I talking about again?" Right, like that.
By far my favorite chapter was her walk with her toddler son as I myself have an almost-toddler son, and I am endlessly fascinated by what he finds fascinating. We take him to the aquarium to see the bright, colorful fish and silly penguins, and the kid stares at, say, the bolt holding the tank together. Horowitz was smart to start the book with this little man's walk, though, since it hammers home the point that really, nothing is intrinsically more interesting to look at than anything else (except faces, according to science - babies are born to respond to faces). Everything provides an opportunity for investigative study, when you think about it, but in this day of constantly being "on," we too often forget that. Horowitz's book is a nice, if slightly off-target, reminder to slow down and look at the world around you.
I can think of no better ending to this review than the immortal words of one Mr. Ferris Bueller:
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."***
*I pride myself on being a grammar nerd, but this is tripping me up. Do I say am or is there?? Calling Jess, help please...both sound wrong.
**I don't know why I said that. They're clearly well-established in their fields and are fully deserving of the "expert" title.
Loading...
