I didn’t really need another
reason to like Andrew Luck. He’s
smart, talented, and a good sport.
Now that he has started a book club, I am a real fan. I wrote about the book he chose for
kids a couple of weeks ago. His
first selection for adults (although, depending on your kids, I can see them
getting into it also) is The Boys in the
Boat by Daniel James Brown.
What a great story. A bunch of mostly poor kids from
Washington overcome all kinds of struggle from dysfunctional families to
financial disaster against the background of the Great Depression. They learn to pull together and win
gold in Hitler’s Berlin.
It would have been very easy for
this to have been just a sports book.
The athletic achievement of the group has enough heft all by itself,
what with guys jackhammering on the construction of Grand Coulee Dam in the
summer to raise money for school in the fall and incidentally get even stronger
and other similar tales. What
makes it more is that Brown has a sense of history. He puts all the grit and brawn and inherent struggle to
achieve in the context of the Dust Bowl on one hand and the Nazi rise to power
on the other.
Go read it.
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