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Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe
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About This Book
A riveting new biography of America's greatest all-around athlete by the bestselling author of the classic biography When Pride Still Mattered. Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. He won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw's New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, he was one of a kind. But despite his colossal skills, Thorpe's life was a struggle against the odds. As a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he encountered duplicitous authorities who turned away from him when their reputations were at risk. At Carlisle, he dealt with the racist assimilationist philosophy "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." His gold medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball. His later life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress. He roamed from state to state and took bit parts in Hollywood, but even the film of his own life failed to improve his fortunes. But for all his travails, Thorpe did not succumb. The man survived, complications and all, and so did the myth. Path Lit by Lightning is a great American story from a master biographer.
Reviews
"For the most part he succeeds, though Thorpe's pattern — to start strong, then flame out, then walk away — feels unbearably sad, the waste of so much potential and experience."
"This attention to detail is impressive, but the narrative sometimes meanders, slowing down the flow."
"But Maraniss's greatest contribution to the factual record of a transcendent athlete is his account of the years after Thorpe's glory ..."
"sensitive and compelling ..."
"Maraniss not only succeeds in revealing the man behind the fable, but also exposes the shameful treatment that Native Americans endured, as the government sought to take their land and erase their culture ..."
"He was a man of the Sac and Fox Nation who spent his life searching for independence in a country designed to confine him and his people."
"Maraniss trains his keen eye on the remarkable career of Jim Thorpe ..."
"By those lights, Jim Thorpe is unquestionably a champion."
"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)."
"Throughout a book marked by deep research and expert context-setting, he sifts through the myths about Thorpe and Native Americans, depicting his subject as a proud, complicated man who sought to shape his own destiny, yet was bedeviled by larger forces of racism and hypocrisy ..."
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