Daniel Brown's The Boys In The Boat

To be an Olympic athlete, serious dedication is required in order to succeed. In Daniel Brown’s book The Boys in the Boat, one can fully understand the commitment and desire for success that each Olympic athlete requires. However, determination and skills are not the only factors that affected the Olympic athletes in The Boys in the Boat. The time period in which the athletes lived had a major affect on their success or failure. The time period affected the Olympic athlete as person by changing their personality, in addition the Olympic athletes ran a greater risk of perusing an Olympic dream, and lastly with the Great Depression, there was an increased sense of nationalism throughout the United States, and the Olympic athletes gave hope to the struggling people of America. The book takes place at the start of the Great Depression. The 1930s was also the time of the Dust Bowl, which gave this time period the name “Dirty Thirties”. “The whole country seemed to have withered and browned under the searing sun (Brown, Daniel pg. 120).” People were starving and began moving east in search of better lives. “There were millions of tons of food around, but it was not profitable …show more content…
For Olympic athletes in particular, there was a greater struggle due to a choice to be selfish or not. Athletes put everything that they had towards training and trying for achievement. The prospect of succeeding became a higher peril, yet the athletes in the 1936 Olympics chose to risk it. For some of these athletes, failure was handed to them, and everything was lost. On the other hand, for the boys of the Husky Clipper, victory was achieved. The 1936 Olympics seemed to occur at just the right moment, because with the amount of nationalism in the United States, due to the Olympics gave some hope to the people that one day their country would be just it used to be and everyone could live the American Dream