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Start giftingA Terrible Splendor
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Learn moreThe greatest tennis match ever played pitted the dominant Don Budge against the seductively handsome Baron Gottfried von Cramm. This deciding 1937 Davis Cup match, played on the hallowed grounds of Wimbledon, was a battle of titans: the world's number one tennis player against the number two; America against Germany; democracy against fascism. For five superhuman sets, the duo's brilliant shotmaking kept the Centre Court crowd—and the world—spellbound.
Against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the brink of World War II, one man played for the pride of his country while the other played for his life. Budge, the humble hard-working American, vied to keep the Davis Cup out of the hands of the Nazi regime. On the other side of the net, the immensely popular von Cramm fought Budge point for point knowing that a loss might precipitate his descent into the living hell being constructed behind barbed wire back home.
Set at a time when sports and politics were inextricably linked, A Terrible Splendor gives listeners a courtside seat on that fateful day, moving gracefully between the tennis match for the ages and the dramatic events leading into global war. A book like no other in its weaving of social significance and athletic spectacle, this soul-stirring account is ultimately a tribute to the strength of the human spirit.
Marshall Jon Fisher's work has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, and other magazines. His essay "Memoria ex Machina" was featured in Best American Essays 2003. He is the author of a novel, A Backhanded Gift, as well as several other nonfiction books, including the award-winning A Terrible Splendor. He is also author of Seventeen and Oh: Miami, 1972, and the NFL's Only Perfect Season. Marshall lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.