Anne Bartlett

Joe Rantz ended up in one of the finest eight-man crews ever to make it to the Olympics largely because he needed a janitor’s job to pay for college. After a poverty-stricken, affection-deprived boyhood, he was trying desperately to earn enough money to get through the University of Washington. Earning a spot on the rowing team guaranteed a part-time campus job. So in 1933, he tried out for crew, and in 1936, he and his boatmates won gold in Berlin.

Author Daniel James Brown had the good luck to encounter Rantz at the end of his long life. Brown’s interviews with Rantz and, after his death, with his daughter, form the heart of The Boys in the Boat, an inspirational yarn that joins books like Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time as a reminder of how bad it can get and how tough ordinary Americans can be.

The 1936 University of Washington crew that beat the Italians and Germans at Hitler’s Olympics was no rich-boy endeavor. Big, strong young men coming of age during the Great Depression, most of them had worked in logging camps, farms, even building the Grand Coulee Dam. Theirs was the Seabiscuit of rowing shells, at a time when rowing’s popularity as a spectator sport was sky-high.

The boys rowed for two men who became legends: head coach Al Ulbrickson and freshman coach Tom Bolles. They worked in tandem with George Pocock, an extraordinary Englishman who revolutionized shell-building and rowing technique—and, along the way, gave Rantz the advice about trust and character that changed his life.

Brown weaves the crew’s rollercoaster of ups and downs with the parallel preparations in Germany, where the Nazis temporarily suspended their campaign of terror to convince the world that they weren’t so bad. But ultimately, Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Olympia captured a different kind of triumph of the will, as the boat, guided by the flawless strategy of a coxswain of Jewish descent, came from behind to beat the teams they would be fighting on the battlefield in a few years.

Rantz had a particularly horrific childhood, marred not only by death and economic hardship, but also by a stepmother who literally threw him out of the house. When he joined the UW crew, he found a true home. “It was when he tried to talk about ‘the boat’ that his words began to falter and tears welled up in his bright eyes,” writes Brown. The “boys” are all gone now; what a sportswriter called their “poem of motion” lives on.

It’s one of the great lingering conundrums of American history: How is it that the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence was a lifelong owner of slaves?

George Washington freed his slaves in his will, after his relatives talked him out of doing it during his lifetime. Not Thomas Jefferson, in life or death. Instead, he collateralized them to borrow the money to rebuild Monticello, and left writings that were all over the map: pro-emancipation, anti-emancipation and everything in between.

Before the civil rights movement, historians tended to ignore or cover up the reality of Jefferson’s slave ownership. More recent ones have wrestled with it. Author Henry Wiencek, who wrote about Washington’s decision in An Imperfect God, doesn’t think it’s that complicated. In his persuasive Master of the Mountain, he concludes that Jefferson realized quite quickly that slave ownership could be extremely profitable. He consciously chose money over morality and spent the rest of his life pretending otherwise to his liberal European friends. “Jefferson constantly moved the boundaries on his moral map to make the horrific tolerable to him,” Wiencek writes.

Many of Jefferson’s admirers will find this assessment hard to accept. But Wiencek makes a forceful case through a careful description of Jefferson’s records, letters and actions, as well as memoirs by his former slaves and archaeological findings at Monticello. Wiencek argues that Jefferson wasn’t even a particularly kindly master: He was decent enough—usually—to his house servants, but left his field workers to the mercies of overseers whom he himself acknowledged were thugs.

Wiencek is among those who believe Sally Hemings was Jefferson’s slave-mistress and the mother of several of his children, but he doesn’t buy the theory that their relationship was a heartwarming secret romance. Instead, Wiencek goes through the evidence to show that it was likely a more pragmatic bargain.

Master of the Mountain is a remarkable re-creation of Monticello’s economy and culture, and it’s not a positive one. Whether you agree or disagree with Wiencek’s provocative analysis, it’s a book worth taking seriously as we continue to struggle with slavery’s legacy.

Until the mid-19th century, the only way to obtain a divorce in England was through a private act of Parliament. Given the difficulty of such a process, it made divorce effectively impossible for anyone but the rich and powerful.

Then, in 1858, came the revolution: Divorce Court. The unhappy rushed to take advantage of the new law, and domestic secrets were exposed to all. Perhaps the most sensational resulting scandal involved Henry and Isabel Robinson, the subject of Kate Summerscale’s riveting Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady.

It started when Henry Robinson, a prosperous manufacturer, read his wife’s secret diary and found what he believed was evidence of her infidelity with a respected doctor who ran a flourishing health spa. Henry filed for divorce, naming the doctor as co-respondent. With the diary—emotional, erotic, but not specific—as evidence, the newly appointed divorce judges had to decide whether the marriage should end and who should pay the cost.

Summerscale, whose earlier book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, focused on the same period, has found a story that wonderfully encapsulates much of the social ferment of the time. Isabel was a talented but frustrated woman whose friends were among the progressive intelligentsia. Her marriage a disaster, she lost her religious faith and found comfort in phrenology. Her putative lover—who denied everything and told everyone she was crazy—was a pioneer in health care.

Summerscale uses the diary, private letters, newspaper stories and public documents to seamlessly and dispassionately tell Isabel’s still-poignant story.

Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama had the same goal: a sea route to “the Indies.” Despite our October holiday, it’s abundantly clear who succeeded. The Portuguese da Gama decisively won the contest by rounding Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and finding his way to the wealthy spice port of Calicut in India in 1498. Columbus’ voyages had the greater long-term impact by opening the Americas to European colonization. But historian Nigel Cliff argues in his sweeping Holy War that da Gama’s deeds had a huge influence on the economic and cultural competition between East and West that continues today.

Da Gama’s sea journeys provide the framework for Cliff’s epic, but he is only a symbol of the larger Portuguese imperial effort in the 15th and 16th centuries. Portugal’s royal house had two interwoven objectives: the worldwide spread of Christianity and the acquisition of wealth. Spurred on by their mistaken belief in a nonexistent Eastern Christian king called “Prester John,” they set out to break the Muslim Arab monopoly on the spice trade from India to Europe. Da Gama was the perfect spearhead.

Da Gama’s encounters with Africa and India make a compelling adventure tale, told by Cliff with the right mix of sweep and detail. Cliff portrays da Gama as tough, smart, ruthless and consumed with the hatred of Islam typical of his Iberian crusader background. He was a far better leader than Columbus, and although he certainly made mistakes—for example, he was long under the strange misapprehension that the Hindus were Christians—he got results.

Christianity didn’t triumph throughout the globe, but Cliff argues that the maritime empire created by da Gama and his successors through bloodshed and guile did tip the economic balance of power from the Middle East to Europe. That empire was mismanaged and short-lived, but the Dutch and English followed where the Portuguese led. The consequences linger.