Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 8/3/2007

8/3/1932:
More than 85,000 fans in the Memorial Coliseum at Los Angeles thrill to the exploits of sprinter Eddie Tolan of Detroit, who adds an Olympic gold medal for winning the 200-meter dash to the gold he earned in the 100 meters earlier this week. Huge crowds fill the newly constructed stadium with its distinctive peristyles for two full weeks as Team USA wins the overall medals count with 103 (41 gold), and the Depression-era economy gets a robust infusion of money placed in circulation.

Birthdays:
Lance Alworth b. 1940
Marcel Dionne b. 1951
Rod "Shooter" Beck b. 1968
Troy Glaus b. 1976
Tom Brady b. 1977


“An American author as distinctive as any of those now writing.”—The New York Times on Richard Wright

Native Son is a towering classic of American literature. It’s the life story of Bigger Thomas, a black man who accidentally kills a white woman and then becomes caught in a whirlpool of consequences that pulls him inevitably to his doom. Wright’s portraits of poverty and black culture in the 1930s still sting with pain and immediacy.

NATIVE SON, by Richard Wright (1940; HarperPerennial, 1998)