Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Today is the end of Adaptation Week.

We spent the past few days listening to authors whose books got turned into huge movies,

and today we're going to end it with a couple of big ones. Later in the show, we'll have the authors

of American Prometheus, the book that inspired the box office juggernaut that was Oppenheimer.

But first, later this year, George Clooney is coming out with a movie he directed called The Boys in

the Boat. It's based on the 2013 book of the same name, but the subtitle gives you a decent

handle on what it's about. It reads, nine Americans and their epic quest for the gold at the

1936 Berlin Olympics.

The boys are in the boat because they're rowers, by the way.

The book's author, Daniel James Brown, talked to here and now as Robin Young, back when the book was published,

and he really focused on how tight, how in sync this rag-tag crew team had to be in order to be successful.

In 1936, nine young oarsmen from the University of Washington transfixed their fellow

American.

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And as one writer later said, wiped the smile off of Hitler's watching face as they beat the German crew to win the gold medal in rowing at the Berlin Olympics.

But even before they won the gold, their coaches knew these young men were something special.

The boys who had made it this

far were rugged and optimistic in a way that seemed emblematic of their Western roots. They were

the genuine article, mostly the products of lumber towns, dairy farms, mining camps, fishing

boats, and shipyards. They looked, they walked, and they talked, as if they had spent most of their lives

...