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    Speed Kings: The 1932 Winter Olympics and the Fastest Men in the World
    Unavailable
    Speed Kings: The 1932 Winter Olympics and the Fastest Men in the World
    Unavailable
    Speed Kings: The 1932 Winter Olympics and the Fastest Men in the World
    Audiobook13 hours

    Speed Kings: The 1932 Winter Olympics and the Fastest Men in the World

    Written by Andy Bull

    Narrated by Eric Meyers

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A story of risk, adventure, and daring as four American bobsledders race for the gold in the most dangerous competition in Olympic history.

    In the 1930s, as the world hurtled toward war, speed was all the rage. Bobsledding, the fastest and most thrilling way to travel on land, had become a sensation. Exotic, exciting, and brutally dangerous, it was the must-see event of the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, the first Winter Games on American soil. Bobsledding required exceptional skill and extraordinary courage-qualities the American team had in abundance.

    There was Jay O'Brien, the high-society playboy; Tippy Grey, a scandal-prone Hollywood has-been; Eddie Eagan, world champion heavyweight boxer and Rhodes Scholar; and the charismatic Billy Fiske, the true heart of the team, despite being barely out of his teens. In the thick of the Great Depression, the nation was gripped by the story of these four men, their battle against jealous locals, treacherous U.S. officials, and the very same German athletes they would be fighting against in the war only a few short years later. Billy, king of speed to the end, would go on to become the first American fighter pilot killed in WWII. Evoking the glamour and recklessness of the Jazz Age, Speed Kings will thrill readers to the last page.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 20, 2015
    ISBN9780698412316
    Unavailable
    Speed Kings: The 1932 Winter Olympics and the Fastest Men in the World

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    Reviews for Speed Kings

    3/5

    24 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I found the overall subject matter of Speed Kings to be very intriguing considering the infancy of the sport, the 1932 Olympics and the characters who became the U.S. Bobsled Team. It has all of the ingredients for a great read. I give Andy Bull a tremendous amount of credit for doing his due diligence in terms of documenting the historical perspective of the time and the details contributing to the development of the team and their exploits. However, I think the old adage that "you can get too much of a good thing" applies in this case ... at least for me. I constantly found myself immersed in a lot of historical minutia that as the book progressed became a distraction from those elements of excitement, daring and danger that I felt I had been promised. It just became too much and eventually ground away at my interest.
    • 2/5
      This book came to me just after I had gotten home from touring the Olympic facilities in Lake Placid, New York. I was excited to read more about the origins of bobsledding, and to gain more appreciation of the Lake Placid Olympics. However, the characters didn't draw me in, and ultimately I didn't end up finishing the book.
    • 3/5
      Once again The Library Thing Early Reviewers has provided me with both a genre and author I would normally not have chosen. Speed Kings by Andy Bull was about the 1932 Winter Olympics and the bob sled teams.There was lots of history and personal details about the men involved. The book was both very interesting at times and a bit tedious. I learned a lot by reading this book.
    • 3/5
      There is a lot of detail packed into this book. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it, i did, but I think this is a case where less might have been more. Nevertheless if you have an interest in the evolution of sports, the winter olympics, or history this book is worth your time.
    • 2/5
      Very informative. But this book didn't grab me like a well-written non-fiction work should. It was just too text book for me. The subject matter was great. I feel the author missed the bobsled on this one.
    • 4/5
      Good book, not great. If you're interested in bobslieghing, this is your book. The author provided great information about the sport. However, the book is really character driven. I'd like to read more from this author, but I'm done with bobsledding...
    • 4/5
      The subtitle to Speed Kings says, "The 1932 Winter Olympics and the fastest men in the world." And while the subtitle is completely accurate about what Andy Bull has written, the actual story within the pages is much richer than that. The bobsled competition of the 1932 Lake Placid Winter Olympics is the pinnacle of the story, but before bringing the reader to that point Bull goes back, in both time and place, to tell a compelling and multi-layered narrative. Speed Kings could easily be characterized as a bit of specialized sports history but I think if you read it you will find a story, a true story, that is as rich and interesting as a well-written novel.
    • 3/5
      Speed Kings is a thorough account of the principal figures on the US Olympic bobsledding team at Lake Placid in 1932. The story is rich in complexities--the personalities and backgrounds of the athletes, the maneuverings of the Lake Placid Winter Olympic management, and the looming of another war in Europe. Bull tells it all in rich detail. The problem is that he tells more than I wanted to know about the wealthy families, the working class origins, the marriages and college educations and whatnot of the multiple players. Much of it seems like gossip to me, and eighty-five year-old gossip has no savor to It.
    • 1/5
      I tried really hard to get into this book, but after reading the first third, I gave up. Mr. Bull could use a good editor. He included so much minutiae in his introductions to the participants that I lost interest in them. Often, his prose seemed more appropriate for a weekly gossip rag. The story is a good one; it just needs to be told more tightly.
    • 4/5
      Well, you can certainly gain a profound understanding of all the people involved, as Bull provides a very detailed back story of every major person involved. I am surprised at the amount of detail packed into a relatively short book and it gives the reader an intimate view into the lives of early 20th century sportsmen.
    • 3/5
      The Speed Kings is a facinating look at the 1932 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, and the increible bobsledder's who where the featured highlight of the games. These were a group of adventures men, who had really no special talent on the ice. The only experienced member of the team was Billy Fiske, while the other three men were always just up for a good thrill seek. Andy Bull spans the book over the 1930's through very jagged stories of the creation of the team. Bull seems to lack editing skills because during the book he will continuely begins to tell other stories that caused the book to get off track. I was really looking forward to reading a book, similiar to Boys in the Boat, but the offer whelming information caused the book to drag down my read. Really Andy Bull could of done one book on the biography of Billy Fiske, another on bobsled team and finally one on how the Olympics came to Lake, Placid, New York in 1932.
    • 3/5
      Adrenalin. Risk takers. Dare devils. Speed junkies. Some people are just built to pursue thrills. They thrill to the feeling of air whistling past their faces and sights flashing in their peripheral vision too fast to make out. Others of us are content to watch these people hurtle down hills and around curves, or better yet to find them in the pages of a book. Andy Bull's book, Speed Kings, about the men who would come to represent the US in bobsled at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid gives readers a chance to live vicariously through these "fastest men in the world."Bull combines part history of the sport of "bobbing," part biography of several team members, and part story of how the Olympics came to Lake Placid in 1932 in this sporting tale. Although the team was comprised of four men, the focus here is on Billy Fiske, a young, wealthy boy who was the embodiment of speed and competition and in fact the central figure, the heart and soul, of the team. In fact, the story opens with Fiske's daring and unlikely landing of a crippled fighter plane in Britain during WWII and his resultant death. After setting the stage with Billy's heroic death and a brief chapter centered on the teenager's life and lifelong attraction to speed, the tale moves backwards to cover the roots of the sport of bobsledding in St. Moritz, the winter playground of the rich. Starting as a tourist event open to all that quickly became too dangerous for any but the most reckless, bobsledding was a risky, adrenaline-filled sport that drew high society and thrilled crowds. As it grew in notoriety, it required more and more skill to drive a bob, eventually leading this exciting and novel sport to be added into the line-up of the fledgling Winter Olympics.The story, while focused more on Billy Fiske than on his other teammates, does look at the interestingly disparate backgrounds of the four men who would eventually bob for the US in 1932: Tippy Gray, Eddie Eagan, Jay O'Brien, and of course, Billy Fiske. Each man had a very different road to the Olympic team and Bull looks at their lives and how they either fell into or chose the sport that caught the public's imagination. In addition to the history of the sport and the lives of the men, Bull also focuses on the almost failed attempt to bring the Olympics to the small town of Lake Placid, the man behind the effort, and the personality conflicts and financial crises that plagued the whole endeavor.Bull has done a lot of research but sometimes the narrative is overwhelmed by the information he shares and his choices about what to elaborate on and what to skim superficially didn't always feel the right way round. It is so wide-ranging and detailed that it doesn't always maintain an even narrative tension and feels very choppy. The story is quite long and drawn out in the run up to the Olympics and the late addition of some of the very important people is a bit disconcerting. But as a piece that paints a picture of a time period with the decadence of the Roaring Twenties giving way to the austerity and loss of the Great Depression as the world faced an uncertain future with possible war looming again, he does a good job. Despite the flaws in the narrative, that a small town in upstate New York would step in, when bigger donors balked, and give money, even in the depths of the Great Depression, to bring the Olympics to their town, that the public would so fully embrace the new sport of bobsledding, and that an American team, a long shot by now, would overcome dramatically warm weather conditions to capture the gold makes this a tale worth telling.