To Save the Man

"In To Save The Man, John Sayles has given us a harrowing story that not only deserves to be read but also reckoned with.” — Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls

"To Save The Man takes us inside the Carlisle School, the most famous of 19th century residential Indian schools, where piously confident white teachers ruled isolated Indian children with a regimented brutality wrapped in good intentions. With kaleidoscopic empathy, John Sayles takes us by turns into the minds of those teachers and of the students whose resistance to bewildering tyranny is both heartbreaking and magnificent. Historically accurate, devoid of sentimentality, beautifully written and structured, TO SAVE THE MAN is, hands down, the best book I've read in years." —Mary Doria Russell, author of The Sparrow

“Set in 1890, the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre, John Sayles’s novel, To Save the Man, is a story of a culture taken. At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, young Native Americans find themselves having to negotiate the demands of assimilation against the ways of life they’ve always known. A master storyteller, Sayles reminds us of the cost of history on the individual life. This blend of fact and invention makes for an unforgettable read.” —Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever

“John Sayles is one of the most important public historians of our generation.”—William Cronon, President of the American Historical Association

PRAISE FOR JAMIE MacGILLIVRAY

“Jamie MacGillivray is remarkable in that it manages to be both sweeping and intimate, to deliver to the reader the tides of political history but also a moving and internalized portrait of two young people swept along on these tides...Jamie MacGillivray is Sayles’s sixth novel — his first was published in 1975 — and by some distance his best. It gets under the skin of this extraordinary time in a way that few historical novels do. Sayles writes superbly about the confusion of warfare and deals equally well with the horrors of the plantations...This is a first-rate historical novel told with wit, verve and a subtle understanding of the mechanics of the genre." --Alex Preston, The New York Times Book Review


"An immersive reading experience that swirls with complex personalities, illuminating the many sides of what would come to be called the French and Indian War." -- Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review


"Film director and novelist Sayles (Yellow Earth) follows in this strong outing the parallel stories of a Scottish rebel and a young Scottish woman pressed into servitude and sent to the Caribbean... he has a knack for bringing his many characters to life, and he makes palpable the raw violence of war and the uncompromising inequality of the period. It’s a worthy epic." -- Publishers Weekly

"Acclaimed screenwriter, director, and novelist Sayles blends his wide ranging narrative skills to great effect in this sprawling historical epic...Sayles’ grand vision yields a rollicking yarn that will satisfy the discerning historical adventure reader." -- Booklist