Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Alexie, Sherman (Vol. 96) - Anne Goodwin Sides (review date 17 October 1993)

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Anne Goodwin Sides (review date 17 October 1993)

SOURCE: "Making It Against the Odds," in Book World—The Washington Post, October 17, 1993, p. 6.

[In the following review of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sides examines how Alexie uses storytelling to help rescue his tribe and his culture from oblivion.]

Reading Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is like leaning out the side window of a speeding car, watching the world slip in and out of focus faster than you can sort the future from the present from the past. The world, in this case, is an American Indian reservation. Keeping time like the staccato thumping of a nail stuck in a tire are drumbeats, blaring televisions, dancing, fighting, nightmares, visions and the small explosions of beer bottles thrown from a car driving in no particular direction.

Maybe from all that thumping, the narrators of most of the 22 stories in...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Alex Kuo (essay date 1992)
   2. Publishers Weekly (review date 1 February 1993)
   3. The New Yorker (essay date 10 May 1993)
   4. Sybil S. Steinberg (review date 19 July 1993)
   5. Andrea-Bess Baxter (review date August 1993)
   6. Brian Schneider (review date Fall 1993)
   7. Reynolds Price (review date 17 October 1993)
   8. Anne Goodwin Sides (review date 17 October 1993)
   9. Publishers Weekly (review date 8 November 1993)
   10. Frank Allen (review date 15 November 1993)
   11. Joseph Bruchac (review date Winter 1994)
   12. Alan R. Velie (review date Spring 1994)
   13. James Beschta (review date May 1994)
   14. Carl L. Bankston III (review date May-June 1994)
   15. Andrea-Bess Baxter (review date November 1994)
   16. Leslie Marmon Silko (review date 12 June 1995)
   17. Frederick Busch (review date 16 July 1995)
   18. Abigail Davis (review date July-August 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Sherman Alexie