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Igniting the Flame: America's First Olympic Team
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The story of the fourteen men – largely forgotten and never the subject of a full-length book – who created the American Olympic movement by winning eleven gold medals at the first modern Olympics in 1896 in Athens, timed for publication leading up to the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials and the 2012 Olympics in London.
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Start your review of Igniting the Flame: America's First Olympic Team
Think about this. An American Olympian shows up for the an event, having never really tried it before,doesn't know what to expect; some accommodating Greek athletes demonstrate, and he wins!! Such was the state of turn-of-the-century international athletic competitions. And so it was that a small American team of 14 members traveled to Athens, having no idea what sort of competition they would face. Not much: They came home with 11 firsts to a country now ecstatic about the Games! Reisler weaves
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Note: All of these ratings are on a 1-10 scale.
Quality of Writing: 6
Nothing spectacular here; fine word choice and sentence construction, but nothing to get excited about. The quotes were used well and did not feel forced as quotes sometimes can. Perhaps there were too many quotes for my usual tastes, but as I'm doing research on this topic, I found it helpful.
Pace: 3
Good point: this book is a fairly fast read. Bad points: all of the breaks in time, jumping around, etc. Usually it was explained ...more
Quality of Writing: 6
Nothing spectacular here; fine word choice and sentence construction, but nothing to get excited about. The quotes were used well and did not feel forced as quotes sometimes can. Perhaps there were too many quotes for my usual tastes, but as I'm doing research on this topic, I found it helpful.
Pace: 3
Good point: this book is a fairly fast read. Bad points: all of the breaks in time, jumping around, etc. Usually it was explained ...more
An enjoyable read. Before reading Igniting the Flame all I knew about the first modern Olympics, held in Greece in 1896, could be put in a nutshell: Baron Pierre de Courbertin was single handed in being responsible for spearheading the movement to revive the ancient Olympic Games and along the way wrote the Olympic creed that hasn't changed over time; the marathon was won by Spiridon Louis, a Greek shepherd? water-carrier? farmer? army officer? who ran barefoot and came out of nowhere to place f
...more
amazing to think that sports in this nation was once mainly an amateur, collegiate affair, almost exclusively run at the club level ... you won't recognize the Olympic movement depicted here
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This was a fairly interesting book about the 1896 Olympic games, first in the modern era.
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