Product Description

From the critically acclaimed and bestselling author David Maraniss, a groundbreaking book that weaves sports, politics, and history into a tour de force about the 1960 Rome Olympics, eighteen days of theater, suspense, victory, and defeat

David Maraniss draws compelling portraits of the athletes competing in Rome, including some of the most honored in Olympic history: decathlete Rafer Johnson, sprinter Wilma Rudolph, Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila, and Louisville boxer Cassius Clay, who at eighteen seized the world stage for the first time, four years before he became Muhammad Ali.

Along with these unforgettable characters and dramatic contests, there was a deeper meaning to those late-summer days at the dawn of the sixties. Change was apparent everywhere. The world as we know it was coming into view.

Rome saw the first doping scandal, the first commercially televised Summer Games, the first athlete paid for wearing a certain brand of shoes. Old-boy notions of Olympic amateurism were crumbling and could never be taken seriously again. In the heat of the cold war, the city teemed with spies and rumors of defections. Every move was judged for its propaganda value. East and West Germans competed as a unified team less than a year before the Berlin Wall.There was dispute over the two Chinas. An independence movement was sweeping sub-Saharan Africa, with fourteen nations in the process of being born. There was increasing pressure to provide equal rights for blacks and women as they emerged from generations of discrimination.

Using the meticulous research and sweeping narrative style that have become his trademark, Maraniss reveals the rich palate of character, competition, and meaning that gave Rome 1960 its singular essence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #211418 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2008: Armed with the same engaging narrative found in Clemente and When Pride Still Mattered, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss chronicles the triumphs, tragedies, and treacheries of "the Olympics that changed the world" with Rome 1960. The same Games that announced the greatness of icons like Cassius Clay, Wilma Rudolph, and Rafer Johnson, also exposed a growing unrest between East and West, black and white, and male and female. Even the host city of Rome, Maraniss recounts, was "infused with a golden hue...an illuminating that comes with a moment of historical transition, when one era is dying and another is being born." With moving portraits of the Games's remarkable personalities woven among tales of espionage and propaganda, Rome 1960 explores an Olympics unable to fight off the troubles of the modern world. Cold War sniping and issues of social inequalities were spilling into fields and stadiums, and the face of sport was rapidly changing. History buffs and sports fans alike will appreciate Maraniss’s quiet reporting, as he deftly removes himself from a storyline that is still relevant today. --Dave Callanan

From Publishers Weekly
Overshadowed by more flamboyant or tragic Olympics, the 1960 Rome games were a sociopolitical watershed, argues journalist Maraniss (Clemente) in this colorful retrospective. The games showcased Cold War propaganda ploys as the Soviet Union surged past the U.S. in the medal tally. Steroids and amphetamines started seeping into Olympian bloodstreams. The code of genteel amateurism—one weight-lifter was forbidden to accept free cuts from a meat company—began crumbling in the face of lavish Communist athletic subsidies and under-the-table shoe endorsement deals. And civil rights and anticolonialism became conspicuous themes as charismatic black athletes—supercharged sprinter Wilma Rudolph, brash boxing phenom Cassius Clay, barefoot Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila—grabbed the limelight while the IOC sidestepped the apartheid issue. Still, we're talking about the Olympics, and Maraniss can't help wallowing in the classic tropes: personal rivalries, judging squabbles, come-from-behind victories and inspirational backstories of obstacles overcome (Rudolph wins the gold, having hurdled Jim Crow and childhood polio that left her in leg braces). As usual, these Olympic stories don't quite bear up under the mythic symbolism they're weighted with (with the exception perhaps of Abebe Bikila), but Maraniss provides an intelligent context for his evocative reportage. Photos. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jamie Malanowski

Seldom is a book as ill-served by its subtitle as is David Maraniss's Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World. Maraniss resolutely illuminates every long-running story that enjoyed a chapter at these summer games, and there are many: the Cold War rivalry, waged not only between the United States and the U.S.S.R. but also between their satellites and surrogates; the struggle for racial and gender equality in sports and in American society writ large; the assertion of pride by newly independent Third World nations; and the burgeoning influence of drugs, money and television on athletics. It's true, as Maraniss writes in his preface, that "in sports, culture and politics -- interwoven in so many ways -- one could see an old order dying and a new one being born" in August 1960. But some 400 pages and weeks of exciting events later, one sees these games less as a turning point than as just another step along the road.

Aside from the overreaching subtitle, Maraniss has written a colorful, fast-moving and often dramatic book. He chose an underexposed subject: Despite the tremendous performances of American athletes such as the young and irrepressible Cassius Clay, as well as the legendary triumph of the barefoot Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila, the Rome Olympics are not remembered as vividly as the games in Mexico City, Montreal or Munich. Television, and its ability to turn medal winners into superstars of sport and advertising, made the difference; the Rome Olympics were the first to capture a significant TV audience, but coverage was still slight by today's standards. In 1960, as Maraniss explains, film of events was flown across the Atlantic via commercial airliner to New York, where it was cut, if it arrived in time, for the CBS Evening News, or for a 15-minute late-night recap narrated by Jim McKay. In that way, the games in Rome certainly changed television history: A then little-known ABC producer named Roone Arledge saw the programs, which led him to create "Wide World of Sports" with McKay as host.

Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor at The Washington Post, set a very high standard with his excellent books on Bill Clinton, Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente. His great strength as a biographer is his ability to dig deeply into his subject's story and bring out important themes over time. The nature of the Olympics, in which so many events are held in rapid succession over a compressed period, and in which most athletes perform only a few times on a few days, deprives him of his best asset. In his biography of Lombardi, When Pride Still Mattered, Maraniss showed how the coach honed his approach during stops at Fordham, West Point and with the New York Giants long before he reached the frozen tundra of Green Bay's Lambeau Field. In Rome 1960, the author simply lacks the space to build, even though he begins the stories of some of his central figures, including the effervescent sprinter Wilma Rudolph and the dignified decathlete Rafer Johnson, years before the games. Their victories, which are tales not only of athletic prowess but also of triumph over racial bigotry, are uplifting. But even so, Maraniss has to spread his attention around, and his stars become ensemble players. The book is like a dim sum brunch: lots of dishes that come and go, some before you're altogether ready to move on.

Because of this, oddly enough, the stories in the book that stand out are those of performers whose efforts have faded from memory, among them C.K. Yang, the decathlete from Taiwan who almost beat his friend Johnson; India's Milkha Singh, the "Flying Sikh," who became a national hero after he broke the Olympic record in the 400-meter dash, even though three other runners were faster and he did not win a medal; and hard-luck American sprinter Dave Sime, who, after missing the 1956 Melbourne games with an injury, and after being nipped at Rome in the 100-meter dash, led his team to victory in the 4 x 100 relay, only to have the performance disqualified because of a teammate's error. (Sime did come home with a story even rarer than that of a triumphant athlete: He was approached by the CIA to act as an intermediary in an effort to persuade a Soviet athlete to defect; Sime was a reluctant conspirator and, in any event, the effort failed. But it adds a bit of Cold War suspense to the book.)

Maraniss does a splendid job of resurrecting these heroes from almost a half-century ago, and of reminding us why we like the Olympics: They are days devoted to spirited young people with rare talents and tremendous discipline who vie for a moment in the sun that, for all but a few, is swiftly eclipsed by the triumphs of another day.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

History made interesting and easy to read
I bought this book after hearing an interview with Maraniss on NPR. Normally, this isn't my kind of book. I'm not an athlete. I'm not a fanatic about the Olympics. I'd rather knit or read a cozy mystery that I can breeze through in a night. And yet, I love this book.

Each chapter is like a short essay on some facet of the 1960 Olympics: the controverial decision in the men's swimming event, the Tigerbelles' encounters with racisim on their road the Olympics, the political controvery between China and Taiwan, and more. Maraniss paints a picture of the world's political and social climate to show how those factors affected the 1960 Olympics and how the 1960 Olympics affected the world.

Each story is compelling--48 years later, I feel minor outrage that Lance Larson wasn't awarded the gold for men's swimming. I understand the terror Rafer Johnson must have felt outside of Lenin Stadium when the Russian crowd surged toward him after his defeat of Kuznetsov. Maraniss deftly captures the human stories and makes this reader care. I'm only 5 chapters into the book, but I wish I could skip work today to finish the rest of the book.

Before reading this book, I hadn't watched the Olympics in over 20 years. Now, I'm psyched for 2008 Summer Olympics!

Terrific Reading about the World at a Crossroads - and Glimpses of Sports Superstars, too!
The world is changing so fast right now that most of us can barely keep up with the daily news that affects our lives, jobs and future. So, it's a rare and wonderful treat when a book comes along that carries us back to a time and place when the world changed more slowly - to show us one of those events that truly did change our global culture. When such books come along, they're usually about wars - but not this new gem by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Maraniss.

Given my own background as a journalist, I'll confess that I was puzzled by Maraniss' decision in selecting "Rome 1960" for a thick new book of nearly 500 pages (that's counting all the extras at the end). As I picked up the book, I kept asking myself: Why did he call this particular meet -- "The Olympics that Changed the World"?

As a specialist in religion and culture, I've immersed myself in histories of other Olympics: the 1924 "Chariots of Fire" Olympics, the 1936 Nazi-dominated Olympics, the 1972 Olympics when terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes - and even the 1964 Tokyo Olympics that were a milestone in global culture in part because of Kon Ichikawa's historic documentary film.

But having read Maraniss' new book, I've got to agree - Rome in 1960 ranks right up there as a milestone in world culture.

I had not considered the roles of the major players who all collided in Rome that year - including the now-infamous anti-Semite and pro-Nazi American czar of the Olympics movement: Avery Brundage. If you don't find yourself drawn to "Sports" - but you are fascinated by 20th-Century history, especially the 1930s, Fascism and the Holocaust - this is a "must read" book for you. Think of it as a "sequel" to books about the controversial Nazi Olympics in which Hitler, Goebbels and Riefenstahl essentially pulled a fast one on Brundage in convincing him to help them celebrate their glorious new Reich.

As a journalist, I'm a longtime follower of new research into that earlier era - and Maraniss picks up the Brundage story in 1960 and pretty much nails the man and his many levels of hypocrisy - and lets us see how this antique figure collided with many of the realities of later-20th-Century culture. Among the key details Maraniss adds to our understanding of Brundage are personal jottings he made during the Rome Olympics that, among other things, complained of the emergence of "Jews ... demanding restitution for everything lost and lot more." (Of course, Brundage somehow managed to continue at the helm through 1972 in Munich, where controversy continued to surround his decisions.)

What's great about this new book is that everything I've said about the Brundage sub-plot is just one of many compelling storylines that Maraniss explores in these 500 pages. Among other things: These were the Olympics in which Cassius Clay exploded onto the global stage, later to transform himself into Muhammad Ali. These were the games of Wilma Rudolph. These were the games in which commercial interests were knocking down old-school barriers that claimed to be preserving an "amateur" tradition. Doping became an issue at Rome. Two Chinas and two Germanys jostled at these games.

This is summer reading at its best. The next Olympic games are looming. The world is no longer merely tilting on its axis. No, global culture now is spinning at a topsy-turvy rate, it seems.

Pick up "Rome 1960." If you're like me, you won't stop until you've read the whole thing - and you'll come away understanding just a little more about how we all got to this place we're standing in this strange new century.

In Time For The 2008 Olympics
Mr. Maraniss is a former reporter of the Washington Post and author of acclaimed biographies of Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi. He is a wonderful writer and storyteller. With the approach of the 2008 Summer Games, "Rome, 1960" takes us back to a simple era, without the terrorism threats, outrageous commerialism and non-stop TV coverage. The Cold War was the backdrop and the author weaves in the stories of the athletes, the familiar and the unfamiliar. I don't know that these Olympics changed the world as Mr. Maraniss argues (the 1968 Games in Mexico City or the Munich Games in 1972 have a better claim) but the world has changed since then.