After reading, “Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894 ” famous olympic gold medal rowing champion Joe Rantz contacted the author, Daniel James Brown, to discuss the central character of the book, who happened to be the champion’s childhood friend. On his deathbed, Rantz started to weakly tell Brown his life story, and Brown decided that his story could not go untold, and sat down to write “The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.” Although rowing has lost its popularity in modern times, in its prime, rowing was a very illustrious and competitive sport. With origins in universities in Europe, rowing soon spread to the East Coast to prominent institutions like Yale,…