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In the vein of Never Let Me Go and Killers of the Flower Moon, one of America's greatest storytellers sheds light on an American tragedy: the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the 'cultural genocide' experienced by the Native American children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School ...
In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle School, a military-style boarding school for Indians in Pennsylvania, founded and run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt considers himself a champion of Native Americans. His motto, "To save the man, we must kill the Indian," is severely enforced in both classroom and dormitory: Speak only English, forget your own language and customs, learn to be white.
As the young students navigate surviving the school, they begin to hear rumors of a "ghost dance" amongst the tribes of the west—a ceremonial dance aimed at restoring the Native People to power, and running the invaders off their land. As the hope and promise of the ghost dance sweeps across the Great Plains, cynical newspapers seize upon the story to whip up panic among local whites. The US government responds by deploying troops onto lands that had been granted to the Indians. It is an act that seems certain to end in slaughter.
As news of these developments reaches Carlisle, each student, no matter what their tribe, must make a choice: to follow the white man's path, or be true to their own way of life ...
"[A]n electrifying and convincing chronicle of resistance among Indigenous students at the Carlisle Industrial School in 1890...Sayles constructs his story masterfully, weaving together the disparate motivations of his characters—from the homesick students to their Indigenous teachers and the well-meaning but misguided white administrators who see their reeducation policies as more humane than outright genocide. Readers will carry this with them for a long time." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[Sayles's] latest wrenching, masterful novel [is] a virtuosic performance by a gifted storyteller." —Booklist (starred review)
"The Wounded Knee sections are imperfectly woven around the Carlisle sections, as if the book were separate novels. But in both plotlines, a racist urge to harm obtains. Pratt proclaims: 'Our mission at the Carlisle School is to baptize the Indian youth in the waters of civilization—and to hold him under until he is thoroughly soaked!' (Or drowned.) A well-researched study of state-sanctioned bigotry." —Kirkus Reviews
"In To Save the Man, John Sayles has given us a harrowing story that not only deserves to be read but also reckoned with." —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls
"To Save The Man takes us inside the Carlisle School, the most famous of 19th century residential Indian schools, where piously confident white teachers ruled isolated Indian children with a regimented brutality wrapped in good intentions. With kaleidoscopic empathy, John Sayles takes us by turns into the minds of those teachers and of the students whose resistance to bewildering tyranny is both heartbreaking and magnificent. Historically accurate, devoid of sentimentality, beautifully written and structured, To Save The Man is, hands down, the best book I've read in years." —Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow
This information about To Save the Man was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Sayles is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, and novelist. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, for Passion Fish (1992) and Lone Star (1996). He has written eight novels, the most recent being Yellow Earth (2020) and Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade's Journey (2023), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice.
Author Interview
Link to John Sayles's Website
Name Pronunciation
John Sayles: sails
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