My firend, Julie, from Brooklyn, a former teacher in New York’s public schools system, came down for a brief visit last week. She came on a Friday and left Monday – a short visit, but we spent most of it walking and talking.

She left a couple of books with me. One, not read yet, is “I am Malala” by Malala Yousafzai the young Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban because she was fighting for the right of female children to attend school. There is no co-author on the jacket, and I am ready to believe she wrote it by herself. From reading just a bit of the prologue, I think it will be a great read.

The other book is “The Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown. It is about the 1936 rowing team from the University of Washington in Seattle, that won the gold medal at the Berlin Olympics during the rise of Nazi Germany. It is beautifully written, verging on sheer poetry. It gives one an enormous insight into the physical and mental attributes one needs to be a champion rower and does it with incredible power. One is never bored. Brown describes the building of a great boat and writes about the boat makers and the artistry of boat making. He writes about the backgrounds of the boys, choosing one in particular as his focus, Joe Rantz, who died only within the last few years. He writes about their struggle to become the best, to triumph over competing teams, and about their mentors and coaches. He describes the era leading up to the Olympics. It was the aftermath of the Great Depression. He describes Rantz’s desperate childhood years that he overcame by sheer mental strength and determination.

But Rantz was not alone in his special qualities. This was indeed the Greatest Generation as written about by Tom Brokaw. It was also the generation of my late husband who grew up in a cabin with a dirt floor and paper windows on an island in the Wilamette River in Oregon and walked with leaky shoes 15 miles to get to a library where the librarian let him take more books than allowed. And one summer he picked berries and got $10 that he spent on a pair of boots, and could now walk in wet snow without getting his feet wet.

These are the men who saved us in World War II. The story about this group of young men with exceptional qualities even for that time, is inspiring and one comes away with a sense of what, at one time, made us great.
I am lucky to have gained a personal connection to this phenomenal part of the past through having married a man of this generation and listening to his history and through him, to the even earlier history of his parents – so in this way, I was able to connect with past generations not normally accessible – the immediacy of a personal connection brings it all to life for me. And this book has the power to let us all be there. I recommend it highly.

xx, Teal