PanThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThese Truths replicates the same troubling \'vanishing\' that Lepore critiques in 19th-century novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Indigenous absences are not a minor fault with These Truths. They lie at its core and they bear weighty consequences for the story that emerges ... in many respects, like its consideration of the protracted struggle for racial equality, it poses a timely rejoinder to airport best sellers trafficking in whitewashed tales of Founding Fathers and military generals. But the narrative Lepore constructs relies on the eventual exit of indigenous actors to make way for other dramas ... Had Lepore substantively engaged non-textual knowledge systems and cross-cultural translation, she might have impressed upon readers a genuinely transformative approach to the wide-ranging means by which diverse historical experiences can be accessed ... These Truths underestimates readers’ capacities to deal with historical complexity and the nuanced ways that indigenous experiences trouble convenient story lines about America’s most iconic moments ... These Truths provides readers with few satisfying analyses of the underlying structures, ideologies, and processes that animated American movement into native homelands and attendant dispossessions ... Lepore is certainly no defender of neatly triumphalist American histories. She takes some pains to underscore tactics and subversions by which Euro-Americans took over native homelands ... But when a text repeatedly curtails histories in ways that play up indigenous repression, it fosters a partial view, at best ... These Truths is a missed opportunity on many levels.
