The Savage Mind

“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

"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 (starred review)

"A searing blend of history and memoir, written as a letter to his children. Moving seamlessly between the centuries-long legacy of dispossession of Indigenous peoples and today’s political 'crisis'....” Treuer’s elegiac narrative probes how family intersects with systems of power, and taps the deepest wells of feeling. It’s a singularly powerful work."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Following up on The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, his incredible, far-ranging history of this country’s treatment of Indigenous First Nations, Treuer’s latest is a personal and historical exploration of America’s tradition of frontier violence, that bloody legacy of settler-colonialism that continues to manifest in the 21st century, from the streets of Minneapolis to the tent cities of Gaza."—Literary Hub