Although he considers himself a Kiowa, Mr. Momaday's ancestry involves several other bloodlines, including the European. This memoir [The Names] both records and recreates the lives of his forebears, and fuses them with the childhood experiences that formed the author's conception of himself as an Indian—a status which his father's talent and his mother's family might well have enabled him to discard. All of which sounds more complicated than it is when put into Mr. Momaday's graceful, lucid prose. The book is notably honest in presenting early memories as isolated scenes, episodes remembered for no clear reason, time and place frequently uncertain. These sharp vignettes, however, gradually form a pattern and a point of view. By the time Mr. Momaday, age seventeen, goes off to, of all things, a military school, he is forever an Indian and the reader understands why.

Phoebe-Lou Adams, "PLA: 'The Names'," in...