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Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics
Houghton Mifflin
February 2007
On Sale: February 1, 2007
Featuring: Jesse Owens
256 pages
ISBN: 0618688226
EAN: 9780618688227
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
In 1936, against a backdrop of swastikas flying and storm
troopers
looming, an African-American son of sharecroppers set three
world
records and won an unprecedented four gold medals,
single-handedly
crushing Hitler"s myth of Aryan supremacy. The story of
Jesse Owens
at the 1936 Olympics Games is that of a high-profile athlete
giving a
performance that transcends sports. But it is also the
intimate and complex
tale of the courage of one remarkable man. Drawing on unprecedented access to the Owens family, previously
unpublished interviews, and exhaustive archival research, Jeremy
Schaap transports us to Nazi Germany to weave this dramatic
tale.
From the start, American participation in the games was
controversial.
A boycott, based on reports of Nazi hostility to Jews, was
afoot, but it
was thwarted by the president of the American Olympic Committee.
At the games themselves the plots and intrigues continued:
Owens was
befriended by a German rival, broad jumper Luz Long, who helped
Owens win the gold medal at his own expense. Two Jewish
sprinters
were, at the last moment, denied the chance to compete for
the United
States out of misguided politeness to the Nazi hosts. And a
myth was
born that Hitler himself had snubbed Owens. Like Neal Bascomb"s The Perfect Mile and David Margolick"s
Beyond Glory, Triumph captures this momentous episode in sports,
and world, history in a nuanced yet page-turning narrative
full of
drama, suspense, and color.
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