Native American Son

August 9, 2010
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.

August 1, 2010

An impeccably researched biography of one of the world's greatest all-around athletes, a symbol of racial injustice and untapped potential.

This retrospective is not the first to tackle the complex life of Jim Thorpe (1888–1953), but it's the most comprehensive. From his childhood in Oklahoma to career as a struggling actor a half-century later, journalist and biographer Buford (Burt Lancaster, 2000) chronicles a life filled with incomparable athletic achievements, government-sanctioned discrimination and wasted opportunities. Mischievous, overly generous, prone to alcoholism and habitually restless, Thorpe gained prominence on the gridiron at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an Indian boarding school where the half-Caucasian, half-Indian halfback played for legendary coach Pop Warner. He exploded into public consciousness in 1912, leading Carlisle to a national championship and winning gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon in the Olympics. Controversy arose, however, as a prior dalliance in professional baseball would result in his medals being stripped (a lifelong struggle to restore them ensued, though they would not be returned until decades after his death). Stints as a professional baseball and football player followed, but Thorpe's poor fielding precluded stardom in the former, while the latter's nascent status resulted in less-lucrative opportunities than his talents warranted. After his prodigious athletic gifts deteriorated, he constantly struggled with marital problems, finding work and fiscal insolvency. The 1951 movie Jim Thorpe—All American immortalized him, though when he died two years later, more than four years passed before his remains were laid to rest in the newly christened Jim Thorpe, Pa.—a result of family, community and government squabbles. Buford's attention to detail is largely a strength, but it occasionally breeds long stretches in which the minutiae of Thorpe's endless cycle of hopeful new beginnings followed by failures to capitalize obscure the narrative core—the tragedy of a groundbreaking athlete succumbing to obstacles both external (and unjust) and internal (and self-inflicted).

Captures Thorpe's breathtaking highs and heartrending lows, but falls just short of his all-around excellence.

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August 1, 2010

Jim Thorpe was arguably the greatest all-around American athlete of the first half of the 20th century, a star in track and field, football, and baseball, but his life was filled with struggle and disappointment. He was the recipient of honors and acclaim, yet Buford (Burt Lancaster: An American Life) makes clear he was subject to slights and racism as an American Indian in a far-less enlightened time. The author draws on extensive research and interviews to show not only Thorpe's athletic triumphs but also a dysfunctional personal life marked by alcoholism, divorce, and strained relations with his children. His forfeited Olympic medals were reinstated 30 years after his death, but Buford depicts Thorpe's legacy as one of a hero dishonored in his own country. This is the definitive biography of a legendary figure in American history, in and out of sports. An essential purchase.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2010
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 centuryESPN picked him seventh, ahead of Willie Mays, Bill Russell, and Gordie Howe. Bill Crawfords All American: The Rise and Fall of Jim Thorpe (2004) might be more popularly written, but Bufords 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 Thorpes 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)