Unstoppable: How Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team Defeated Army by Art Coulson (review)

Jim Thorpe wasn't much for school, particularly the rigid, demeaning Indian schools in which he kept ending up and from which he kept running away. The Carlisle School football team looked like something he might stick around for, though, and when he finally enrolled at that school, he became a sports phenom. There wasn't much he couldn't do on a track or a field; Coach "Pop" Warner scooped him up for varsity football (and trained him for Olympic track, but that's another story for another day). Coulson focuses here on the Big Game of 1912—Army vs. Carlisle—which pitted highly ranked military cadets against Indian underdogs, a grim symbolism not lost on the players, whose parents and grandparents had not long ago met on battlefields. The final score was Carlisle 27, West Point 6, with Thorpe and his teammates deploying innovative plays that "used their speed and their brains to win." Hardcastle's hatched ink and watercolor pictures are serviceable but stiff, occasionally capturing Thorpe's broad jaw and delicate-eyed thoughtfulness. There's additional material on Carlisle, Thorpe, and Warner in end matter, as well as information on the 1912 varsity players, a glossary, and resources.