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Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink
David Margolick
Nothing in the annals of sports has aroused more passion than the heavyweight fights in New York in 1936 and 1938 between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling?bouts that symbolized and galvanized the hopes, hatreds, and fears of a world moving toward total war.
Knopf
September 2005
Featuring: Joe Louis; Max Schmeling
432 pages ISBN: 0375411925 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
David Margolick takes us into the careers of both men. We
see Louis in his boyhood and amateur days in Detroit and
Chicago, and the blossoming of his boxing genius. We see
him, already a near-mythical figure, taking New York by
storm in the 1930s, fighting before record crowds, the
savior of a sport that had fallen into decline and a long
sought after symbol of redemption for black America after
the scandalous reign of Jack Johnson two decades earlier.
And we witness how with talent, a gentle personality, and
shrewd management, Louis managed to trump the brutal racism
directed at him and came to dominate what had been
primarily a white man’s sport, becoming a hero of
unprecedented power and influence in black America. Schmeling, we learn, was a kind of chameleon, a cultural
icon in Weimar Germany who seamlessly, disconcertingly,
maintained his privileged status after the Nazi takeover.
He pulled off a remarkable feat, relying on a Jewish
manager and a Jewish promoter in New York while being
extolled at home as a model of “racial superiority.”
Margolick meticulously examines all the complex ties that
developed between Schmeling and the Nazis, shattering the
myth that they frowned upon him before he upset Louis in
1936–he was a ten-to-one underdog–and ostracized him after
losing to Louis two years later. We see the extraordinary buildup to the 1938 rematch–the
worsening international tensions seemingly raising the
stakes–in which Louis would need only 124 seconds to defeat
Schmeling, while radio allowed the whole world to listen.
Margolick vividly captures the outpouring of emotion that
the two fighters aroused–in the white South, in the black
and Jewish communities in the United States, in Germany,
everywhere–and he makes clear the cultural and social
divisions the two men came to represent as the threat posed
by the Nazis became increasingly clear, and as America
began to feel the effects of a nascent civil rights
movement. Schmeling’s postwar success in business and
Louis’s sad decline add a poignant coda. A book at once about sports and about a pivotal moment in
twentieth-century history, Beyond Glory pulses with energy
from first to last.
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