DEPTHS OF GLORY

A MASTER BIOGRAPHER TAKES ON ONE OF THE MOST WRITTEN-ABOUT SUBJECTS IN SPORTS, PRODUCING A REVEALING LOOK AT BOTH THE MAN AND THE MYTH

PATH LIT BY LIGHTNING By David Maraniss In 1931, Pop Warner, who had been Jim Thorpe’s football coach at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, wrote in Collier’s, “Our treatment of the Indian is a dark chapter in the history of the United States, which is perhaps the reason the white man has never made an honest effort to understand the red man.” Those seemingly sympathetic words appeared under the headline heap big run-most-fast.

As David Maraniss points out early in his epic biography of Thorpe, his subject is one of the most written-about and mythologized athletes in history. “From the moment I started telling acquaintances I was writing a book about Thorpe, the response was often some variation of ‘Oh, I read a book about him in fourth grade,’ ” he writes. In endeavoring to go deeper,

Maraniss examines how those myths came to be, focusing on how Thorpe was viewed and treated by the country for which he won Olympic gold medals in both the decathlon and pentathlon (beating, among others, George Patton). Spoiler alert: It wasn’t always good.

Maraniss—one of the finest biographers practicing the craft, whose books have placed into context the lives of Roberto Clemente, Barack Obama and his own father— takes several detours from the rags-to-riches-to-rags path of Thorpe’s life. He devotes plenty of pages (and there are more than 600 in the book) to Thorpe’s time at Carlisle, the government-run school in Pennsylvania that had the aim, writes Maraniss, of “saving Indians by making their homelands and customs dissolve into white society.” History lessons can be pedantic, but not in Maraniss’s hands. Here they’re revealing, thoughtprovoking and always engrossing.