SOURCE: "Fire and Ice," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 23, 1992, pp. 2, 7.

In the following review, Ulin, an editor and poet, offers a favorable assessment of Fathers and Crows.

Toward the end of William T. Vollmann's 1990 novel The Ice-Shirt—the first installment in his ambitious and farreaching seven-part "symbolic history" of North America, Seven Dreams—a Micmac Indian chief named Carrying the War-Club picks up an iron ax left behind by a dead Norseman and, after turning the weapon viciously upon one of his tribal rivals, throws it into the sea. It's an odd moment, climactic even, and it resonates with the weight of premonition. Iron, after all, was the instrument 17th-Century European colonialists used both to barter and to battle America's native populations into submission, making Carrying the War-Club's rejection of the ax a gesture of defiance toward the dual forces of time and culture, forces against...