Born the tenth child of a poor Southern sharecropper and barely able to read or write, Jesse Owens would nevertheless go on to win an unprecedented four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, becoming an international superstar overnight and exploding Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy in the process. William J. Baker's Jesse Owens is the most complete and probing biography of Owens ever written, vividly detailing the successes and failures of this complex and troubled but ultimately indomitable figure who transcended his own athleticism and became an American icon.
