A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America's First All-Black High School Rowing Team

"This was a very important audiobook to me this year. It’s written by Arshay Cooper and read by Adam Lazarre-White, who does a beautiful job. So it’s a memoir but it’s not read by the author. The story is about the first American all-Black high school rowing team. I was thinking about why I loved the title and listening to it, but then I suddenly thought that of course Britain has an amazing tradition of rowing! So this is a title which is a lot about rowing and the team, the building of the team and what the team meant to all these young athletes. It’s a great story for your audience to be interested in. My husband was an oarsman so I’ve gotten it for him. The story is mostly set in Chicago, at a high school on the West Side which is very poor, with lots of violence outside of school and disrupted homes. They have sports, but they’ve never had rowing. Then, in 1998, a man decided that the high school needed a rowing team and brought a shell into the high school cafeteria. Now, these students had never seen a rowing shell. They had never seen a rowing race. Some of them had probably never even been near the water, except maybe the Chicago River. The whole concept of this as a sport they didn’t know about. The wonderful thing that Arshay says is that many of the students just turned up to find out about the team because they offered pizza. The draw was a free pizza lunch. Then they recruited these athletes and trained them. They came from very different backgrounds, with tremendous challenges for being on the team, for showing up. But it worked. They were champions and many overcame their disadvantages—because they were so satisfied with this accomplishment that it served as a stepping-stone for many of them to change the way their lives had been going. What’s interesting is that this is not a new book. The reason it came out as an audiobook is that there was just a documentary made about the team , of their coming together again and rowing for the Chicago Sprints and about where their lives took them. It’s about how much the training and the motivation that came from the coach and the sponsor of the team helped change their lives, including Arshay Cooper who has gone on helping young people get motivated and get out of the lives they want to change. I think this is a beautiful representation and inspiration for believing that that can happen. Adam is very good. Adam is not a young narrator, but Arshay Cooper is not writing this as a young person: he’s looking back as an adult. But, of course, there’s a lot of street talk because it’s about the kids in high school. Adam Lazarre-White does a brilliant job of balancing that and making it believable, because you have to believe that that dialogue, as it was written, is real. It’s a beautiful audiobook."