SOURCE: Penner, Jonathan. “Full Blooded.” Washington Post Book World (9 July 2000): 7.

In the following review, Penner comments on Alexie's exploration of the struggle for American-Indian cultural identity as experienced by the characters in The Toughest Indian in the World.

The protagonists of these nine stories [in The Toughest Indian in the World] are all proud to be Indians but hardly comfortable, or even quite sure what it means. “What is an Indian?” is a question asked over and over, either implicitly or in just those words.

What indeed? These aren't Hemingway's Indians, drunks freezing to death at the roadside. Sherman Alexie's Spokanes and Coeur d'Alenes, uncomfortably half-assimilated, tend to be fiercely intellectual (one insists that cars deserve love—specifically, agape) and as witty as stand-up comics. At the same time, they long to be warriors, comparing their own tribulations to those of Geronimo, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

Being...