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Undefeated

Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team
Jan 03, 2019IndyPL_SteveB rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
Steve Sheinkin is a treasure among writers. He is a fine researcher who knows how to take history and write it with the energy of a novel. And he does it in a style aimed at young adults but enjoyable by adult readers. With Jim Thorpe, Sheinkin has a real challenge. How do you balance a biography of perhaps the greatest athlete of the 20th Century with the terrible treatment of Native Americans that ironically gave Thorpe his opportunity to be noticed? Thousands of children were forcibly removed from their parents and sent east to school’s like the Carlisle Indiana School, where they were shorn of their long hair, forced to speak only English, and often treated brutally, while being indoctrinated into “American” culture. The football and track coach at Carlisle was Pop Warner (now considered one of the great innovators in the sport). With Warner’s help, Thorpe became the greatest football player in the country and the Carlisle Indian School played football against the top colleges, including Harvard, Yale, and the other Ivy League schools. At the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe represented the United States in the two most grueling all-round events: the pentathlon and the decathlon. He won the gold medal in each, and then he returned home to great acclaim, more football, and ultimately a difficult life filled with prejudice and scandal.