Search Results: Sports from I Cannot Live Without Books

Olympic Pride, American Prejudice: The Untold Story of 18 African Americans Who Defied Jim Crow and Adolf Hitler to Compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Deborah Riley Draper and Travis Thrasher
THERE IS A BLACK "CLOSEOUT/REMAINDER" MARK ON THE BOTTOM PAGE EDGES.
Set against the turbulent backdrop of a segregated United States, sixteen black men and two black women are torn between boycotting the Olympic Games in Nazi Germany or participating. If they go, they would represent a country that considers them second-class citizens and would compete amid a strong undercurrent of Aryan superiority that regards them as inferior. Yet, if they did not compete, would they ever have a chance to prove people wrong on a global stage? To be better than anyone would expect?
Twenty-two-year-old Mack Robinson stands in the shadows for a moment, unseen from the crowd of the 1936 Olympic Games. Off the track, waiting to be called for the final race, he can't help thinking of Jessee Owens, the one they're all talking… Read More

War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith
In the fall of 1918, as the Great War raged across the Atlantic, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as the deadly Spanish flu spread through the city. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And with every ounce of attention focused on the war effort, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as radical workers lecturing about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek.
In such a delirious moment, Americans hungered for heroes and villains -- larger-than-life figures upon whom they could cast their hopes and fears, or who might simply offer a moment of distraction. War Fever explores this pivotal time in American history through the stories of three such men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony… Read More