Over one tumultuous week, Rob Carrey will learn that he cannot leave the past in his wake. But the price that they pay for a shot at glory will scar each member of Carrey’s team far into adulthood.Ĭolin Payne, the Massachusetts blue-blood Jumbo, the good natured giant John Wadsworth the preppy lawyer-to-be Ruth Anderson, the Yale-bound coxswain and Rob Carrey, the scholarship athlete from Niccalsetti, New York - all of them are forever bound to one another by the terrible cost of victory. Despite having long ago buried the memories of the brutal year he spent at the elite Fenton School in Connecticut as a postgraduate rower, Carrey finds that those days now return to haunt him.The Fenton School Boat Club’s top rowing team, called the God Four, is legendary. (Inconveniently for Halberstam, only one of them lands a medal, but in a double shell, not in a scull.) Tiff Wood, the book’s most engaging character, doesn’t even race in Los Angeles.When documentary filmmaker Rob Carrey flies back to New York from a shoot in South Africa to salvage his relationship with his lover Caroline Smythe, he unexpectedly finds himself called back to his former boarding school following a heartbreaking tragedy. The story is a complete mare’s nest, attempting to follow four separate scullers seeking medals in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The book showcases everything that was wrong about Halberstam. Who finishes first in this literary regatta? I’d have to say the late David Halberstam, with his 1985 masterpiece “The Amateurs” (Morrow, 1985). Is the director of recreational rowing at Harvard.) (Boyne, author of the excellent, how-to book “Essential Sculling,” “Red Rose” is very much a Boston book, as Harvard coach Harry Parker agreed to select a women’s boat for a first-ever trip to the world championships, training them out of Harvard’s Newell Boathouse.

Boyne’s crisp, chipper account of the awkward birth of women’s rowing. In our hypothetical race, it would be impossible not to mention “ The Red Rose Crew: A True Story of Women, Winning and the Water,” Try that in a 2-foot-wide racing shell sometime.

“True Blue” - also made into a movie - features mid-river fisticuffs, with oarsmen punching each other after colliding on the freezing Thames. As in David Fincher’s movie, “The Social Network,” the American rowers are the bad guys. (Doubleday Canada, 1989), WHICH RECOUNTS THE ACRIMONY THAT ROILED HIS TEAM AS IT SOUGHT TO AVENGE ITSELF AGAINST C AMBRIDGE IN THE 1987 B OAT R ACE. So what about that book regatta? One of my favorites is coach Daniel Topolski’s “True Blue: The Oxford Boat Race Mutiny”

Flat Water Tuesday by Ron Irwin