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The first comprehensive biography of the legendary figure who defined excellence in American sports: Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest all-around athlete the United States has ever seen.
With clarity and a fine eye for detail, Kate Buford traces the pivotal moments of Thorpe’s incomparable career: growing up in the tumultuous Indian Territory of Oklahoma; leading the Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team, coached by the renowned “Pop” Warner, to victories against the country’s finest college teams; winning gold medals in the 1912 Olympics pentathlon and decathlon; defining the burgeoning sport of professional football and helping to create what would become the National Football League; and playing long, often successful—and previously unexamined—years in professional baseball.
But, at the same time, Buford vividly depicts the difficulties Thorpe faced as a Native American—and a Native American celebrity at that—early in the twentieth century. We also see the infamous loss of his Olympic medals, stripped from him because he had previously played professional baseball, an event that would haunt Thorpe for the rest of his life. We see his struggles with alcoholism and personal misfortune, losing his first child and moving from one failed marriage to the next, coming to distrust many of the hands extended to him. Finally, we learn the details of his vigorous advocacy for Native American rights while he chased a Hollywood career, and the truth behind the supposed reinstatement of his Olympic record in 1982.
Here is the story—long overdue and brilliantly told—of a complex, iconoclastic, profoundly talented man whose life encompassed both tragic limitations and truly extraordinary achievements.
- Sales Rank: #1181415 in Books
- Published on: 2010-10-26
- Released on: 2010-10-26
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.61" h x 1.78" w x 6.66" l, 2.20 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 496 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Buford (Burt Lancaster: An American Life) covers Thorpe's life of "high triumphs and bitter despair" in extensive detail. Thorpe (1888–1953), a "mixed-blood" Sac and Fox Indian from Oklahoma who starred for the legendary Carlisle, Pa., Indian school's college football team, won the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, prompting the king of Sweden to declare him "the most wonderful athlete in the world." The next year, however, Thorpe was stripped of his gold medals after it was discovered he had violated the amateur athletic code by playing minor league baseball. The loss haunted him throughout his hardscrabble life in which he abused alcohol, married three times, constantly needed money, and was an absentee father. His peripatetic story included myriad roles: avid hunter and fisherman; professional baseball player in the major and minor leagues; pro football player; bit actor with often degrading nonspeaking Indian roles in many westerns as well as in other movies, including King Kong; merchant marine during World War II; security guard at a Ford plant; bar and restaurant owner; supporter of American Indian causes; and regular speaker on the lecture circuit. Buford reports the facts and dispels many fictions about this American icon.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Buford gives a full account of the legend and tragedy of Native American sportsman Jim Thorpe, considered one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century—ESPN picked him seventh, ahead of Willie Mays, Bill Russell, and Gordie Howe. Bill Crawford’s All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe (2004) might be more popularly written, but Buford’s account, at some 170 more pages, brims with detail, all of it relevant to the telling, from the disastrous divvying up of Native American land that young Jim witnessed in 1890s Oklahoma; to Thorpe’s stellar performances in football, baseball, and track and field; to the stripping of his 1912 Olympics medals because he was paid to play baseball for two summers; and, finally, to the makeshift life he cobbled together after his playing days ended. Buford imparts a sense of the incandescent skills Thorpe applied to his sports, and the discrimination and self-destruction that shadowed him throughout his life. --Alan Moores
Review
“Diligently researched . . . Buford lays firm, clear historical groundwork for the reservation life and Indian world in which Thorpe grew up . . . Thorpe, in Buford’s account a likable and engaging if feckless man, seems tragically destined to wander forever, the fastest itinerant in the world.”
-Jay Jennings, The New York Times Book Review
“A professional biographer has proved what sound research and skillful writing can do: reveal a singular man, animate the times of his life, and illuminate the complexities of our world today, which Jim Thorpe helped to shape.”
-American Heritage
“Compelling . . . Exhilarating . . . Buford is persuasive when she insists that, both for better and for worse, Jim Thorpe’s true story is indeed stranger than most fictional tales of rising and falling heroes.”
-Michael R. Stevens, Christianity Today Books and Culture
“This is the definitive biography of a legendary figure in American history, in and out of sports . . . An essential purchase.”
-Library Journal
“Buford . . . knows about mythic heroes and draws a complex portrait of Jim Thorpe: from his superhuman athletic talents to his all-too-human flaws.”
-Steven V. Roberts, The Washington Post
“This book is written with razor-sharp clarity, rock-solid scholarship, and a prose that is as elegantly executed as it is at times heartbreaking. Native American Son, meticulously researched, is a book that finally sets the record straight to provide justice at last to a legitimate American hero.”
-Larry Cox, Tucson Citizen
“An absorbing American story.”
-Steve Kaufman, Louisville Courier-Journal
“Impeccably researched . . . This retrospective is not the first to tackle the complex life of Jim Thorpe, but it’s the most comprehensive . . . Captures Thorpe’s breathtaking highs and heartrending lows.”
-Kirkus
“From the opening paragraphs I realized that Native American Son was going to be gripping and illuminating. Kate Buford not only tells us a great deal we never knew about a legitimate American icon, she tells us a great deal about an America of which we may not have been fully aware, and does so in splendid prose.”
-Ira Berkow
“As an athlete, Jim Thorpe was a force of nature. His achievements, across the board, remain unsurpassed. For many years we have needed a fair and comprehensive story of his life. Now we have it. Kate Buford's biography of Thorpe is a first-rate example of the genre. She has written—with clarity, insight, objectivity, and inspiration—a definitive work. Here is an evocation of triumph and tragedy, ans a uniquely American story.”
-N. Scott Momaday
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Most researched book to date, not a page turner though
By J. Warner
I've always known this incredible story had, amazingly, never been written before by anyone other than someone in the 1950s, and was THE story ripe for a national best seller. I was so confident "The Jim Thorpe Story" had finally arrived when I learned of this new book that I sent a second copy to a professor friend sight unseen when I ordered mine. I knew it was going to be the one book I stayed up all night with and read cover-to-cover. A month later it's sitting on the stand, the bookmark about halfway through. The author has so much research into this that I'm puzzled by what a weak storyteller she is. I wanted it to be great...but it has no cadence, and is agonizingly deflating by what appears to be the author's lack of intuition on what is interesting and remarkable, and what isn't. There is less than a page, for instance, on the boat ride over to Stockholm for the Olympics. I don't even know how long it took. Odd blurt-outs such as "Jim was an excellent ballroom dancer" are editorialized remarks made in passing with no further comment. I asked my friend if it was me "just not getting it" and he hadn't finished the book either. Still, whenever I do finish it, I'll know so much more about the life and times of Jim Thorpe than I did before...I already do. It just wasn't the fun adventure.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Don't Miss This
By Marilyn Johnson
This is a must-read book for anyone who cares about biography, history, sports, native Americans, Hollywood, or the human condition. It has it all in the form of the charismatic Jim Thorpe, a spectacular talent whose exploits would be hard to believe if such a trustworthy and gifted writer as Kate Buford weren't describing him. How could a football player catch his own punts?... have reactions "so fast that sometimes you couldn't follow them with the eye"?.... leave his nearest rivals so far in the dust one is tempted to think of Secretariat?... And how could someone as beloved as Thorpe been so unfairly stripped of his Olympic medals? In Buford's hands, the man's larger-than-life accomplishments and all-too-human failures and contradictions are balanced and given historical context-- and the reader can't help but mourn his passing.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Jim Thorpe- an outstanding bio of a 20th century superstar
By LL Flippin
For anyone interested in the famous Olympic decathalon champion and for some, the greatest football player ever, who happened to be a native american , read this book! And for anyone interested in the early history of track & field, football, the "real" Pop Warner, baseball, the AAU/Avery Brundage/amateurism, the birth of professionalism, native american politics, racism and Hollywood- this book has it all. Kate Buford has done a superior job of definitive research supporting her bittersweet portrait of a national legend.
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