SOURCE: "Along the Stream of Time," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4673, October 23, 1992, p. 21.

In the following review of Fathers and Crows, Korn concludes that, despite certain problems, "the narrative grips."

[Fathers and Crows] is the second of William T. Vollmann's planned Seven Dreams, a sort of mythic history of North America. The first, The Ice-Shirt (1990), followed the voyages and feuds of the Norsemen, their encounters with Inuit and Amerindian beings, natural and supernatural, their conflicting greeds and dreams, ghosts and demons. Restricted to the comparatively narrow stage of Scandinavia, Greenland and Newfoundland, it weighed in at a laconic 400 pages. Now heavier still and hot on its trail, comes this massive second dream, focused on the second stage of the fatal impact: the arrival in Canada of the French traders who messed up the Indian economy and the Jesuits who messed up their minds. It is vast and...