Rating: 
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I started reading this book out of curiosity and I just could not stop. It is both hilarious and moving in equally profound ways; altogether, great reading. I loved it. It made me want to read more of Alexie's work. And I have.
Rating:
Summary: Alexie is awesome!!!!!!!!
Review: Lone Ranger & Tonto was awesome. I have never read a book that hit me down home.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: Excellent! As a person of Native American descent reading 'Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven' was like coming home.
Rating:
Summary: Lone Ranger and Tonto a poetic eye opener
Review: I first read a snippit of Sherman Alexie's work in my English class a supplement to a novel we were reading and I had always wanted to read one of his books since. Well I finally got a hold of this one and I couldn't put it down. It is written so fluidly that it is obvious he is a poet and the stories are interesting and subtle. Each story conveys Alexie's life philosophies and some interesting insight on the fate of the Native Americans in today's society. Although at times it can be depressing this book is written with a touch of black humor and sometimes you can't help but laugh at the ironies.
Rating:
Summary: A must-read for non-Indians living in Indian Country!
Review: Alexie captures the delicate balance of humor and anger that is present in everyday life for Indians on and off the "Res." This young man has shown a great aptitude for the short story, as well as poetry and the novel. I look forward to reading more
Rating:
Summary: Fun, funny, intelligent, thought-provoking
Review: I tend not to like short stories; to me, novels
are preferable because you have so much more to
sink into and leave the world behind for awhile.
In fact, I probably wouldn't have picked up this
book if I hadn't already read, and liked, "Reservation Blues"
by the same author.I found myself pleasantly surprised. This is an incredibly
enjoyable collection that pulls you in and shakes
the cobwebs out of your brain. Far from escapist,
these stories *feel* like real life, which is always a mark of good fiction. Alexie is a master at the humorous twist, inserting hilarious one-liners where you least expect them without interrupting the flow of the story ("The only living thing in the state of Nevada, and we killed it.") I've heard that "This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona" is being made into a film, and I'm eager to see how Alexie's spare, yet panoramic style translates to that medium.
Rating:
Summary: A well written group of inter-related stories.
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book. Some of the stories are funny, others are mystical, and still others are thought provoking. This book reminded me a lot of the style Michener used in 'Tales of the South Pacific', in that the stories each stand-alone, yet are made more powerful by their linkages.
I think Sherman Alexie is an excellent author.
Rating:
Summary: BRILLIANT, BITTERSWEET TALES OF LATTER-DAY AMERINDIAN LIFE
Review: This is my personal measure of Sherman Alexie, the gifted young Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian writer: He caught my attention in a recently rebroadcast "60 Minutes" feature story. What appealed to me was his sardonic wit--edgy, thoughtful, ironic, challenging, and, yes, I thought, a bit sad. I told myself, Let's see if he can really write, let's see what he's got to say. So I pick up one of his books of prose; within a week, I had read three. This outstanding collection of interrelated stories was the first. Very, very impressive! I loved his writing, his crisp, bone simple and straight style. I felt for his finely etched characters, a handful of them--especially one named Victor, presumably the author's stand-in--recurring throughout. And these are all stories with bite. "Maybe hunger informs our lives," says the narrating voice of "Family Portrait." Roughly the first half of this book exposes us to what it means to be "Native American" today: The spoils of defeat--the tight-lipped, self-destructive despair of a once proud, historic people reduced to segregated conditions. Isolated from the white world, isolated from their own traditions. Subject to poor housing, education and food, chronic unemployment, rampant alcoholism, diabetes, blood fights and bloody ends. Alexie's sharp depictions of conflicted identity, uncertainty in the everyday and lifelong struggles for survival on the Spokane Indian reservation, the contradictory capacities for tenderness and tragedy, beauty and brutality, breaks down our detachment, jars us into realizing both the unique and common human attributes of his people. What he induces is simply called "empathy." As another who grew up in a "reservation"--"the urban ghetto"--I felt that same incoherent rage that plagues so many of his characters. In the commonweal of pain, it was a further demonstration that "you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy." Yeah, okay--"empathy." At the halfway point, I was ready to start writing this review--no question, Alexie had shown he had the literary goods and I wanted to proclaim it--but something told me, first finish the book. Good thing. Why? Because he tricked me--he still held an ace up his storytelling sleeve. "Hope feeds among the tombs," Melville wrote. "Always darkest before the daylight," goes the tireless adage we've all heard somewhere from our elders. "That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic," says the narrator in one of Alexie's stories ("Jesus Christ's Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation"). "Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye . . . no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice." Might be Alexie begins his sleight of hand with the (deliberately) Kafka-esque tale of the trial of Thomas Builds-the-fire, "misfit storyteller" who can still feel the pulse of tradition within him and stubbornly refuses to disown it. (Hmm. Defiance.) Then there's "A Good Story," about the loving, mutually respectful relationship between an old man and a boy. Or the story about the Indian married couple who reconcile after the wife has left her wise-cracking husband for making one joke too many about his terminal cancer. (Hmm. Redemption!) Or the character arc of Victor--whose name, keep in mind, means "conqueror"--over an array of first and third person narratives, as he struggles against the pull of his parents' drunken, broken marriage; resenting his father's departure; the low expectations of Indian schooling; the high expectations of being a local hero; incipient alcoholism; the fear of and yearning for love. The Alexie magic is in balancing the bitter with the sweet; showing us that in the midst of desolation there is also room for resilience, for humor, for trust--for hope. It was during this time I happened to see a repeat of Chris Rock's last HBO special, the one where he advises those folks who're always popping off in the media about how bad their people have it now in this country--how they're "losing America"--to just shut up. "Nobody has it worse than the Indians," he says. "They're all dead!" No, not quite, Chris. Deliberately wounded by long-standing government policy, yes. Demonized and ignored by a "dominant" history, yes. Suffering, yes. But they still survive, human as the rest of us--with faults, foibles, and feelings, nightmares and dreams--and they're championed by one of their own, a writer with a singular voice who tells modern day Indian stories with clarity, style, perception and wit. This book opens a door to consciousness. A highly recommended read.
Rating:
Summary: Lovely and Poignant
Review: I totally adore this book. I first read it in 1994 as a Freshman in High School. It's how I fell in love with Sherman Alexie (he spoke at my graduation last year at the University of Washington and was FABULOUS!!). It's such a lyrical story, the vignettes are lovely, very poignant.
I love Thomas Builds-The-Fire so MUCH!! It makes me so sad the way in which he is received by most people in this book. His stories are so precious and important, I want to blast them over loud speakers!!
So glad I re-read this. Such a beautiful string of intertwined vignettes, even when discussing UN-beautiful things, Alexie's poetic words caress my tongue and brain. Ahhhhh....Good Stuff. Very Powerful. Everyone should read this, at least once.
Rating:
Summary: You'll laugh, you'll cry . . .
Review: Sherman Alexie is some kind of phenomenon. In his short life (born 1966), he has garnered a truckload of accolades and can lay claim to a wide range of achievements as poet, novelist, screenwriter, filmmaker, public speaker, media personality, humorist, recognized spokesman for Native Americans, and on and on. He's won any number of prizes. And all with the inauspicious beginnings of an Indian boy, growing up on the Spokane reservation in Washington.
It's pretty easy to see the promise that is to be found in this early collection of short stories, published when he was still in his twenties. The range of literary forms and voices used to express a complexity of sentiments and a deeply rich sensibility in a writer so young is remarkable. The many customer reviews already posted here (90 as of this writing) attest to the author's impact on his readers. And he is not just a Native American writer. The mix of grief, suppressed rage, and wry humor in these 22 stories cuts through to universals underlying all cultures.
In the title story of the book, the Lone Ranger and Tonto do not make an appearance, let alone fight, but what the relationship between these two men represents to Indians infuses the entire book. This particular story begins and ends with encounters with white men - the first concerning a late-night visit to a 7-11, where the initial fearful suspicion of the white clerk relaxes as his Indian customer starts to joke with him. Later, the narrator is forced to admit that a white basketball player is better than he is. In between, the story tells of his return from the city to live again on the reservation, his concerned mother, a white girlfriend, and an aimlessness that resolves into finding a job. Like Tonto, for better or worse, he makes a place for himself in the white man's world.
Probably the best-known story from this collection is "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," made into the film "Smoke Signals," about the quirky and unlikely companionship between two young Indians who drive to Arizona to retrieve the remains of the dead father of one of them. My personal favorite, however, is "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor," about a dying man who makes light of every adversity. His encounter with a racist, corrupt cop is full of clever, laugh-out-loud wit, and his relationship with his wife is told with deeply tender humor.
I heartily recommend this book as an introduction to modern Indian literature. It captures for anyone with a mind and heart the complexities of Indian identity that lie behind the stereotypes that prevail in the popular imagination - whether racist or sentimental. Readers of Alexie's books will also like Adrian Louis' novel, "Skins."
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