I’m a bit late to the party as this was published 10 years ago but a recent vacation in Berlin led me to seek out some books about the city - hence this which climaxes at the 1936 Berlin Olympic games.
What an amazing story- the book pans between the lives of individual rowers, the socio-economic situation in the USA during the depression years & the propaganda machine that was the pre-war period leading up to the Olympic Games during the rise of Hitler.
I must admit to shedding quite a few tears around the family life of Joe which resembled something from the (original) Grimm fairy tales - the ones where stepmothers banish the children.