I really enjoyed this - do I sound surprised? I should, because non-fiction is definitely not my usual territory. Not only that - it is a sports story, and sports is totally not my thing.
One of my problems with non-fiction is that you generally know in advance how it is going to come out. In this case, we know that these guys go to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and bring home gold. By the way, in case you hadn't guessed from the title, their sport is rowing - eight man crew. I can't say I've always had a secret fascination with crew - because I haven't. Somehow, Brown manages to maintain a high tension level even though the reader knows - from the very beginning, when Brown meets Joe Rantz shortly before his death and Joe's daughter shows him the gold medal. Or maybe it is the other way around, because I knew all along that they would get there and win, I could keep reading, in spite of the crises and set-backs.
Brown does another thing that I typically find annoying, but he managed to make it work. He packs in large quantities of history - particularly of the propaganda division of Hitler's Germany. The reader suffers through a grueling season of hours of rowing in horrid weather - honestly, the weather was not THAT bad the years I lived in Seattle - and suddenly the scene changes and we are in Germany attending the birth of Goebbel's daughter - and handed the fact that in a few years the child's mother would poison her - and her other four children - before she and her husband commit suicide in the collapse of the Third Reich.
There is as much incident and event as any reader could want, but somehow the whole thing is character- driven.
Did hundreds of thousands of people really turn out for these boat races? I had no clue.
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