SOURCE: "Bleak and Beautiful Moments," in The American Book Review, Vol. 14, No. 5, December, 1992–January, 1993, pp. 1, 3.

An American critic and educator, Purdy has written several essays on such Native American writers as James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich. In the following review, he favorably assesses The Power of Horses, and Other Stories and From the River's Edge.

The Power of Horses includes some of the best stories from the anthologies, and they share the powerful voice of the more recent ones in the volume. Moreover, taken together, they reflect a very clear vision of the life of Crow Creek, as seen by Cook-Lynn. Her stories over the years have been wonderful in their sparse brevity, but now they are given a context that makes them even more compelling. Like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, The Power of Horses is a collage of individual...