Charles Dickens's Hard Times is a novel divided into three books. These books
are titled "Sowing," "Reaping," and "Garnering." Explain how the first book's
title relates to the events, characters, and themes that Dickens addresses in it,
and analyze how the novel's first book conveys Dickens's central message
about rationality and logic in mid-nineteenth-century England.

Sowing is the title of the first book of Hard Times because personalities are being shaped or planted by the schools and institutions and parenting practices embodied in characters like Gradgrind. This is a reflection of the mechanistic logic and cold rationality of the industrial age in nineteenth-century England.

Explanation:

The first book's title sowing relates to the events, characters, and themes in the sense that Dickens was concerned with the miserable lives of the poor and working classes in the England of his day. He called this first book of the Hard Times novel "Sowing" because he is introducing the characters and it is like their personalities are being planted by all the institutions that are part of industrialization. Dickens thinks that industrialization is harmful to the minds and morality of the working classes because humans are turned into machines and they are schooled to suppress the development of their emotions and imagination.

The novel's first book conveys Dicken's central message about rationality in the Gradgrind character. Gradgrind believes that people should only act in their own interests through rational principles that are devoid of feeling and sentiment. For Dickens, this can lead to indifference to human suffering. This new logic or rationality comes about because of the mechanization of industrialization that reduces our human nature to productivity, wealth and greed at the expense of feelings, creativity, and freedom.  

themselves

an intensive pronoun is a pronoun that ends in self or selves, such as himself, herself, themselves, yourself, ourselves. since band members is a third person plural, the correct intensive pronoun would be themselves. if the band was talked about as a collective noun, itself would be the appropriate intensive pronoun. intensive pronouns are used to add emphasis to the noun it's modifying which is why it directly follows it.

why does the crew join ahab's quest without hesitation?