With the 150th Yale-Harvard Regatta taking place Sunday on the Thames River, we touched base with author Daniel James Brown, who has brought the sport of crew to a new audience. He's done that thanks to his New York Times bestseller "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics."

The nonfiction tome focuses on a group of University of Washington rowers — including Joe Rantz, whose childhood was a dramatic story unto itself — who rose from underdogs to win the 1936 Olympic gold medal in the eight-man shell.

Brown acknowledges that he and his publisher both wondered whether the book would appeal to an audience beyond rowers. Obviously, it has. As of this week, it has been on The New York Times paperback nonfiction list for 53 weeks, spending nine of those in the No. 1 slot. It has become a book club staple and its film rights have been optioned by The Weinstein Company, which has been developing a script. (Brown is not involved with the movie.)

In "Boys in the Boat," Brown even makes a few passing references to the Yale-Harvard Regatta, mentioning that it was the first American intercollegiate athletic competition of any kind. He writes how Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a passionate crew fan, was heading to New London to watch his son Franklin Jr. take part in the race.

While the book explores the sport of crew as it details how the 1936 gold-medal team came together, it also delves into Rantz's life story and into the history of the time, including the impact of the Depression in America and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. (Brown says that, before researching the book, "I didn't really understand the depth of the cynicism that the Nazis had as they were approaching the Olympic games, how they staged Berlin and how they used the Olympics as a propaganda device.")

Brown, who spent 4½ years researching and writing "Boys in the Boat," says he has three or four ideas for his next project that he's batting back and forth with his editor and his agent.

"I'm trying to find something I want to spend the next four or five years with," he says.

Here are some excerpts from our phone interview.

Asked how the Joe Rantz crew would have fared if they had raced in a third lane in the Yale-Harvard Regatta, Brown laughs and says:

"That Joe Rantz crew, that 1936 crew, I think could have beaten any crew in the country that year. I'm sure they would have handily handled either Harvard or Yale. They really were one of the great collegiate crews of all time. They had to beat very good crews to get to Berlin. They had to beat the Brits in Berlin in their qualifying race, and that was probably the steepest challenge of all because the British crew in Berlin was also really exceptional."

Like Louis Zamperini, who was profiled in the book "Unbroken," the young men in "Boys in the Boat" were tough in the face of adversity. Does Brown think that was a function of their growing up during the Depression, their background, their DNA?

"I think it's a combination of all that. I think the Depression was really an important part of it. I often end my book talks by saying that when I stand back from this book and look at it, for me, the big message, the takeaway, is I think this story of these nine guys who climb in the boat and learn to pull together so powerfully and so beautifully. I think it's an almost perfect metaphor for what that whole generation of Americans did in the 1903s. They all faced this tremendous challenge. Almost everybody was humbled by the experience of the Depression, and they learned to come together and pull together and get great things done. That's how they wound up becoming what Tom Brokaw called The Greatest Generation. It wasn't my intent in writing the book at all, but after I was done and I sat back for a minute, it dawned on me that, in many ways, it's a book about that generation and how they learned to pull together. Also, just the character they had in general, the determination and grittiness that they had."

Does he think that how "Boys in the Boat" portrays the importance of teamwork — of learning to pull together, literally and figuratively — plays into the book's popularity?

"I hear this all the time in emails that I get and in Amazon reviews. Interesting, I was totally surprised by this, but shortly after the book came out, I started getting invitations from corporate entities to come and talk about the book as it pertained to building teams ... The whole trust-building, team-building aspect of it, I think, really is at the heart of why (the book) has caught on as well as it has. People really hanker for that. People really want to know how to come together and build great teams."

On theories why crew was a hugely popular sport back then, drawing masses of spectators, and isn't now:

"I don't really know why. I think I know why it was vastly popular in the '20s. There wasn't such competition for eyeballs. On a Saturday afternoon in Seattle on Lake Washington, going down and sitting on the shores of the lake and eating some peanuts and watching the crew races was a reasonably good option for spending a sunny afternoon. We didn't have 40 channels of sports, Major League Baseball, NFL, NBA, and all the money that's poured into promoting those sports to compete with. So I think the reason it's not as popular now is mostly it's got competition from very large, very well-funded sports. Crew has never been very well-funded, so it can't really promote itself as a sport.

"And then, frankly, the other thing, to be perfectly honest, is I don't think it's the best spectator sport in the world. Reality is, you sit on the banks of whatever and watch the boats go by. It's pretty hard, unless you're watching a particularly good race to get a full sense of what's going on."

How he captured in "Boys in the Boat" what it felt like be in these races:

"So much of the drama in a crew race is taking place inside the boat, so one of the things I wanted to do with the book is drop the reader down in the boat and let them experience it from that vantage point ... I knew nothing about crew when I started this. I was really worried about that from Day One. So I made it a mission right from the beginning to reach out to as many crew people as I could."

k.dorsey@theday.com

Twitter: @KAgDorsey

If you go

WHAT: 150th Rowing of the Yale-Harvard Regatta

WHEN: Saturday and Sunday, June 6 and 7

WHERE: The Thames River, between the Gold Star Bridge in New London and Bartlett's Cove in Waterford

DETAILS: On Saturday, Alumni row, noon to 3 p.m.; Combination race, 5 p.m. On Sunday, freshman race, 9:45 a.m.; junior varsity race, 10:30 a.m.; varsity race, 11:30 a.m.

BEST SEAT: The Riverside Park Conservancy recommends New London's Riverside Park, off Crystal Avenue, as a good viewing spot for the start of the race, which this year runs upstream, finishing at Bartlett's Cove in Waterford.