Sherman Alexie admits he was once a "good" Indian, his term for a person of Native American heritage who does his best to assimilate into mainstream North American society. It drove him to drink, and then to write, and with the latter act he found his own particular brand of salvation. A major theme of Alexie's poetry and fiction is the destructiveness of the dominant white culture upon the Indian world, which is then rendered rudderless and confused. Much of the grist for these ideas and incidents comes from life as he witnessed it growing up on the Spokane Reservation. "His work offers a devastating and deeply human portrait of contemporary Indian life," wrote Doug Marx in Publishers Weekly. At the age of just thirty-one, Alexie landed a first in the annals of American cultural history with his screenplay for Smoke Signals, based on a collection of his...