School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-8-Students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania were not allowed to speak in their native tongue and were forced to act like white students with new names and new clothes. Jim Thorpe, who grew up on a reservation but adopted many customs from white people, did not enter the school until he was 15 years old. He would go on to be one of the greatest athletes who ever lived; while at Carlisle, he played football for legendary coach Pop Warner, ran track, and toyed with baseball. While some thought that Thorpe was a reserved young man, listeners learn that he was more of a prankster and a bit defiant at times. Mark Bramhall's storytelling is spot on. VERDICT No need to be a football fan to appreciate this highly recommended audio told by a master.-Karen Alexander, Lake Fenton High School, Linden, MI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
New York Review of Books Review
FEW OF TODAY'S football fans know that much of the game as we now recognize it was developed by a group of Native American kids who were coerced into a Pennsylvania assimilation camp called the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where they were coached by a man named Glenn (Pop) Warner. Before their legendary seasons from 1907 to 1912 there was no forward pass, no misdirection play, no receivers or tight ends. Along with the outsize athletic ability of the ultratalented Jim Thorpe, the Carlisle Indians' speed and inventiveness were both revolutionary and wildly successful: They went 43-5-2 over the four years of Warner and Thorpe's collaboration. Along the way, they defeated established teams like Harvard, Penn, Georgetown and Army. In today's terms, that would be the rough equivalent of the Alabama Crimson Tide's losing to a team from DeVry University. In "Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team," Steve Sheinkin recounts those mythical seasons and the remarkable performances of Thorpe, a man frequently considered the greatest athlete of all time. Perhaps Thorpe is most remembered for taking pentathlon and decathlon gold in the 1912 Olympics despite a lack of formal training in track and field. But the bulk of "Undefeated" is concerned with Thorpe's teenage years, the upstart Carlisle Indians football program and the transformation of some of the country's most tyrannized youth into its greatest team. Sheinkin has made a career of finding extraordinary stories in American history, researching them exhaustively and recounting them at a nimble pace for readers aged 10 and up. What sets Sheinkin's work apart is his willingness to tackle horrific chapters in United States history - the creation of the atomic bomb, the Vietnam War - with a candor that is unusually respectful of young readers' intelligence. His stories center on heroic actors without short-selling the abhorrent circumstances that forced them into heroism in the first place. The background of the Carlisle Indian School makes Thorpe's and the team's ascendancy even more astonishing. The institution was founded in 1879 by Richard Henry Pratt, a retired Union general, after the United States Army had succeeded in largely wiping out the country's Indians and their resistance to westward expansion. The children at Carlisle and other Indian schools that sprang up around that time were less like students and more like child prisoners of war, taken from their families, stripped of their culture and dress, beaten or imprisoned for speaking their native tongues. It was the kind of barbarism and heartlessness that undergirds much of America's development, yet it was regarded as an act of charity. "Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition and life," Pratt is quoted as saying. "Kill the Indian in him and save the man." In Sheinkin's telling, culled from extensive interviews, biographies and institutional records, Thorpe comes across as both good-natured and insuppressible. The extent to which this characterization makes him seem implausible is the extent to which it is impossible to imagine someone facing down such cruelty with little more than a relentless spirit and a pleasant demeanor. But Thorpe was, after all, a product of a time in which it was believed a man could get ahead if he just kept his head down and worked hard. It's hard to know which of Thorpe's exploits are accurately remembered and which have become embellished into tall tales over time, but for the modern young reader, Sheinkin's telling holds the kind of hearty inspiration that Old West tales used to nurture in the kids of earlier eras. Thorpe's greatness may be aspirational, but Sheinkin's brisk and forthright delivery makes it seem entirely possible. ? CARVELL WALLACE has written for MTV News, The New Yorker, The Guardian and other publications.
