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An American Legacy
by David Treuer
A searing exploration of American violence, interweaving memoir, history, and reportage to reveal the wound at the heart of our nation―and to offer hope that the country, and we, might be healed.
In the wake of George Floyd's murder and the January 6 insurrection, as America seemed to be falling apart, David Treuer decided to hold himself and his family together the only way he knew how: he sat down to write a letter. What resulted is The Savage Mind, the most personal and powerful work of his storied literary career.
How do we understand America, ourselves, and the impulses that seem intent on destroying both? Ranging from Treuer's upbringing on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota to the experiences of his parents, a Jewish Holocaust refugee and the first American Indigenous woman judge, The Savage Mind reveals the terrifying essence of our nation: frontier violence, which has defined our country, our culture, and our very selves. The frontier, Treuer shows, was a site of epic, phantasmagoric bloodshed, initiated by white settlers but perpetuated by all of us. And after the geographic frontier closed in the late 19th century, it did not vanish―quite the opposite.
Today, Treuer explains, America's frontier―and all its violent pathologies―has migrated overseas and into our hearts and minds. The atrocities in Gaza and the school shootings in the American heartland are bound together by this invisible filament―one that Treuer makes visible in The Savage Mind, and which he offers hope for weaving, once and for all, into a better cloth.
"An extended meditation on fear, violence, history, and other products of the unseemlier angels of our nature...Just as there is beauty in all that terror, there are moments of relief in Treuer's narrative: his account of studying writing with Toni Morrison (who clearly did a very good job), his love of family, and his wish for a better country than the one we live in...An often grim, always provocative study of the contradictions that shape our lives―for better, but more often for worse." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"David Treuer's The Savage Mind is unlike anything I have read. Combining elements of memoir, history and current events he makes all three more intimate and more real and so much more important. Full of subtle irony and astute observation, this book will make a mark." ―Percival Everett, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of James
This information about The Savage Mind 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.
David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, a Minnesota Book Prize winner, a California Book Prize winner, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.
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