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 The...