An 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.
Reads by turns like a polemic, a manifesto, a history and a meditation ... Treuer repeatedly tells us what the Savage Mind is and what it does. Rather than an effective literary device, the repetition here is redundancy. The analogies and tautologies he uses to support his claims undermine them ... Much of this book is successful, and often brilliant. Treuer presents us with the complex and brutal history of the frontier ... Even more captivating are his personal memories: his college years, his fencing trials and successes, his romantic life and his relationship with his teacher Toni Morrison ... Often while reading it, I often wanted to dismiss Treuer’s work for what I think are literary failings. But I still find myself trying to understand it ... His book, perhaps, is of another order, and among those we can carry to a new frontier.
A magnificently honest and intensely personal extended letter to his children ... The stories spill off the pages in a non-linear fashion, moving from family episodes of violence and grief and determination to national moments of the same ... A deeply moving reminiscence about the meaning and nature of our country 250 years after its founding, one that we might not want, but which we desperately need.
Eviscerating ... [A] piercing and propulsive treatise on the distorted relationship between America’s violent history and its treasured frontier mythology.
