March 1, 2022
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maraniss limns the life of stellar athlete Jim Thorpe, who won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, made the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw's New York Giants. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he also faced assimilationist cant ("Kill the Indian, Save the Man") and racism (his medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball), and he struggled with alcohol, money problems, and broken marriages. With a 150,000-copy first printing.
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May 30, 2022
Biographer Maraniss (When Pride Still Mattered) trains his keen eye on the remarkable career of Jim Thorpe (1887–1953), “an archetype, the great athlete, and a stereotype, the romanticized noble Indian... a foundation story of American sports.” Through archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Maraniss assiduously unpacks the “making of the man and the creation of the myth” surrounding Thorpe, the Olympic champion decathlete in track and field, centering his heritage from the outset and offering a historical overview of the kinds of discourse that would plague the athlete from the Sac and Fox nation for the entirety of his career. Along the way, he reveals striking resonances between Thorpe’s legacy and that of Sauk leader Black Hawk, a fellow “American Indian mythologized into spectacle,” nearly 80 years earlier—lending a new light to the racism Thorpe found himself up against, particularly in regard to the stripping of his 1912 Olympic gold medals for violating the rules of amateurism by being paid to play in the minor leagues from 1909 to 1910. While much attention is given to the prejudices Thorpe faced—and, later, his struggles with alcoholism—Maraniss’s work offers an equally fascinating look at his subject’s outsize talent as a man who excelled in the realms of baseball, football, and athletics broadly, tacked onto a vivid backdrop of sports culture in the first half of the 20th century. This essential work restores a legendary figure to his rightful place in history.
June 1, 2022
Who was the real Jim Thorpe? Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and accomplished biographer, answers that question in this meticulously researched account. Although Thorpe's life was filled with loss, heartache, and bigotry, Maraniss focuses on the triumph in the career of this remarkable athlete, even though Thorpe never received the recognition he deserved while alive. From Thorpe's days playing football at Carlisle Indian Industrial School under legendary coach Pop Warner through his gold-medal-winning performance at the 1912 Olympic games (medals he would later be stripped of), his troubles with alcohol, his stint as a major-league baseball player, his fractured family life, and his final years spent traveling the country, working for whoever would hire him, nothing is left out, good or bad. This attention to detail is impressive, but the narrative sometimes meanders, slowing down the flow. Still, Maraniss has written a comprehensive and insightful biography, one that, when finished, may leave readers wondering why they didn't learn more about Thorpe in history class.
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Starred review from June 1, 2022
A sensitive and compelling life of the great, ill-treated athlete Jim Thorpe (1887-1953). Born into the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma, his birth name that of the title, Thorpe was an otherworldly athlete. As two-time Pulitzer winner and Washington Post associate editor Maraniss notes, Thorpe was so phenomenal that he remains "one of the few Native Americans of the twentieth century whom people could cite and praise even if they knew little else about the indigenous experience." He excelled at every sport he played, making his coach at the Carlisle Indian School, Pop Warner, famous in the bargain. In 1912, Thorpe dazzled spectators at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, though his gold medals would soon be retracted after a newspaper reported that he had played pro baseball a couple of years earlier, violating the Games' demands that participating athletes be amateurs. Maraniss rightly objects that in the aftermath, "most of the lies and feignings of innocence involved officials trying to save their own reputations, not his," Warner and future U.S. Olympics head Avery Brundage among them. Thorpe spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name and have his Olympic record restored to him, alternating between poverty and one doomed business venture after another, moving from town to town to join various teams or escape his past. Of course, racism was a powerful element in Thorpe's life, and Maraniss explores this topic with insight and nuance, just as he did in his biography of Roberto Clemente. Particularly pointed is the author's closing anecdote about how Thorpe's widow, apparently a skilled grifter, convinced a Pennsylvania town to rename itself after him with the promise of a well-funded hospital and other income-generating ventures; instead, it got his bones but nothing else. A tale that, though well known in outline, Maraniss enriches with his considerable skills as a writer and researcher.
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July 1, 2022
Pulitzer Prize--winning Washington Post editor Maraniss (Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World), who's known for his best-selling biographies of Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, demonstrates with this latest biography that he moves easily between the worlds of politics and sports. His subject is the multisport phenom Jim Thorpe (1887-1953), whom ABC News has called the top American athlete of the 20th century. After growing up in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) as a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe earned All-American honors in college football, played pro football in its early days, and played several years of Major League Baseball. In the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe won gold medals for the pentathlon and decathlon, making him the first Indigenous American to win Olympic gold for the U.S. He was stripped of those medals the following year, however, when it was determined that he was not a true amateur because he had played semipro baseball. That turn of events would be the fulcrum of Thorpe's life, Maraniss argues here. VERDICT Maraniss's book is the most comprehensive Thorpe biography to date (being nearly 200 well-cited pages longer than Kate Buford's 2010 biography Native American Son). Beyond bringing Thorpe to life, Maraniss also delves heavily into issues of race and culture.--John Maxymuk
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