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The Toughest Indian in the World, by Sherman Alexie
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A beloved American writer whose books are championed by critics and readers alike, Sherman Alexie has been hailed by Time as "one of the better new novelists, Indian or otherwise." Now his acclaimed new collection, The Toughest Indian in the World, which received universal praise in hardcover, is available in paperback. In these stories, we meet the kind of American Indians we rarely see in literature -- the kind who pay their bills, hold down jobs, fall in and out of love. A Spokane Indian journalist transplanted from the reservation to the city picks up a hitchhiker, a Lummi boxer looking to take on the toughest Indian in the world. A Spokane son waits for his diabetic father to come home from the hospital, tossing out the Hershey Kisses the father has hidden all over the house. An estranged interracial couple, separated in the midst of a traffic accident, rediscover their love for each other. A white drifter holds up an International House of Pancakes, demanding a dollar per customer and someone to love, and emerges with $42 and an overweight Indian he dubs Salmon Boy. Sherman Alexie's voice is one of remarkable passion, and these stories are love stories -- between parents and children, white people and Indians, movie stars and ordinary people. Witty, tender, and fierce, The Toughest Indian in the World is a virtuoso performance by one of the country's finest writers.
- Sales Rank: #107949 in Books
- Brand: Grove Press
- Published on: 2000-04-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x 5.50" w x .75" l, .50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 238 pages
Features
Amazon.com Review
Call Sherman Alexie any number of things--novelist, poet, filmmaker, thorn in the side of white liberalism--just don't call him "universal." Aside from his well-documented distaste for the word, its fuzziness misses the point. The Toughest Indian in the World, Alexie's second collection, succeeds as brilliantly as it does because of its particularity. These aren't stories about the Indian Condition; they're stories about Indians--urban and reservation, street fighters and yuppies, husbands and wives. "She understood that white people were eccentric and complicated and she only wanted to be understood as eccentric and complicated as well," thinks the Coeur d'Alene narrator of "Assimilation," who's married (unhappily) to a white man. And yet the issue of race has taken up permanent residence inside her house: the marriage survives, but it's love that's the most thorough assimilation of all.
Like The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, much of The Toughest Indian in the World combines deft psychological realism with the kind of narrative logic more commonly found in dreams. In "South by Southwest," a white drifter finds love on a "nonviolent killing spree" with an overweight Indian he calls Salmon Boy; in "Dear John Wayne," the cowboy actor falls in love with a young Spokane woman and proves himself a charmingly feminist hero. ("Oh, sons, you're just engaging in some harmless gender play," he tells his boys when he finds them trying on lipstick.) But for every bear hibernating on top of the Catholic church, there's also a GAP-wearing, Toyota-driving urban Indian on a quest for his roots. In both realist and surrealist modes, Alexie writes incantatory prose--as well as the kind of dialogue that makes even secondary characters leap into sudden focus: "'What?' asked Wonder Horse, as simple a question as could possibly be tendered, though he made it sound as if he'd asked Where's the tumor?"
Alexie is sometimes guilty of painting his white characters with too broad a brush. (Is any anthropologist truly as obtuse as the one in "Dear John Wayne"? Could any reader really want Mary Lynn, the narrator of "Assimilation," to stay with her boorish white husband?) Yet his kind of firebrand politics still has the power to shock. A harrowing fable about whites kidnapping Indians for the medical properties of their blood, "The Sin Eaters" could be dismissed as paranoid if it weren't so hauntingly written: On that morning, the sun rose and bloomed like blood in a glass syringe. The entire Spokane Indian Reservation and all of its people and places were clean and scrubbed. The Spokane River rose up from its bed like a man who had been healed and joyously wept all the way down to its confluence with the Columbia River. There was water everywhere: a thousand streams interrupted by makeshift waterfalls; small ponds hidden beneath a mask of thick fronds and anonymous blossoms; blankets of dew draped over the shoulders of isolated knolls. An entire civilization of insects lived in the mud puddle formed by one truck tire and a recent rain storm. The blades of grass, the narrow pine needles, and the stalks of roadside wheat were as sharp and bright as surgical tools. It's a hard story to read, and that's only right. The Toughest Indian in the World offers so many pleasures, who could deny it the power to disturb us as well? Funny, dreamlike, heartbreaking, angry--these are stories that could have been written by no one but Sherman Alexie. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
A prolific novelist, poet and screenplay writer, Alexie (Indian Killer; Reservation Blues) has been hailed as one of the best young writers of his generation. This dexterous second collection of stories contains what may be one of the best short fiction pieces of the year. "The Toughest Indian in the World" follows a young Spokane Indian who works at an all-white newspaper in Seattle and, in a forlorn attempt to reconnect with his roots, has his first homosexual experience with a tough Lummi fighter. It's a moving story that skillfully employs symbolism and flashbacks to construct an ending that is both uplifting and sorrowful. Many of the eight other stories in this collection also deal with urban Indians who are straddling two worlds: an intimate but indigent life on the reservation and an affluent but strange and sometimes hostile white middle-class existence. Their solutions to this double bind are rarely ordinary. "Assimilation" tells of a Coeur d'Alene woman who deliberately cheats on her white husband, only to rediscover her affection for him in the middle of a traffic jam. "Class" features a Spokane who sometimes tells white women he's Aztec, because "there were aphrodisiacal benefits from claiming to be descended from ritual cannibals." In "South by Southwest" a white man and a fat Indian nicknamed Salmon Boy, who declares he's not homosexual but does believe in love, set off on a nonviolent killing spree. Two tales, "Saint Junior" and "A Good Man," deal with marriage and death on the rez. The anger in these narratives is leavened by Alexie's acerbic wit and his obvious belief in the redemptive power of love. One exception, however, is "The Sin Eaters," an apocalyptic tale in which America's Indians are rounded up into massive underground prisons where soldiers force them to breed and give up their blood. Humorous, disturbing, formally inventive and heartwarming, Alexie's stories continually surprise, revealing him once again as a master of his craft. Agent, Nancy Cahoon, N. Stauffer Assoc. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Alexie may not be the toughest Indian in the world (in this stunning new collection, that honor goes to a Lummi fighter picked up by the narratorDor perhaps it's the durable narrator himself), but he definitely writes some of the toughest prose around. This work, Alexie's first collection since The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, offers nine stories rendered in muscular, unencumbered language that can deliver a shock like a good, hard punch. No, we shouldn't be much surprised when a character announces, "Indians just like to believe that white people will vanish, perhaps explode into smoke, if they are ignored enough times," but the delivery is so cool we are caught off guard. As the stories proceed from an Indian wife reconnecting with her husband after a calculated tryst to a lesbian couple (one Indian, one white) whose lives are complicated by a down-and-out male friend to an Indian father happy (is he really?) that his son has a good life with a white stepfather, Alexie moves in for the kill, consistently surprising us with stories that are neither sentimental nor angry but far more emotionally complex. Highly recommended.DBarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
176 of 195 people found the following review helpful.
I almost cried a few times and I laughed a lot
By Debra Garfinkle
For a story about an impoverished teen on an Indian reservation who has an alcoholic father and faces bullies and racism and the deaths of several close relatives, I sure laughed a lot. I loved the written humor and the wonderful cartoons throughout the book, as well as learning something about life on a reservation. I finished this fast-paced book in two days and was sorry to see it end. This is one of my favorite young adult novels of 2007.
205 of 231 people found the following review helpful.
Richie's Picks: THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN
By N. S.
"Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a 'Tale of Two Cities' than it is just a 'Shining City on a Hill.' "
-- Mario Cuomo, 1984 National Democratic Convention Keynote Address
"It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.
So opines high school student and sometime cartoonist Arnold Spirit, aka Junior, who is despondent as his father prepares to shoot Arnold's suffering dog because there is no money to pay for a veterinarian's services. But a math teacher -- whose nose is broken when Arnold, in his frustration, angrily throws his generations-old math book --endeavors to change Arnold's sense of helplessness:
" 'You can't give up. You won't give up. You threw that book in my face because somewhere inside you refuse to give up.'
"I didn't know what he was talking about. Or maybe I just didn't want to know.
"Jeez, it was a lot of pressure to put on a kid. I was carrying the burden of my race, you know? I was going to get a bad back from it.
" 'If you stay on this rez,' Mr. P said, 'they're going to kill you. I'm going to kill you. We're all going to kill you. You can't fight us forever.'
" 'I don't want to fight anybody.' I said.
" 'You've been fighting since you were born,' he said. 'You fought off that brain surgery. You fought off those seizures. You fought off all the drunks and drug addicts. You kept your hope. And now, you have to take your hope and go somewhere where other people have hope.'
"I was starting to understand. He was a math teacher. I had to add my hope to somebody else's hope. I had to multiply hope by hope.
" 'Where is hope?' I asked. 'Who has hope?'
" 'Son,' Mr. P said. 'You're going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad reservation.' "
I'd certainly heard of Sherman Alexie. Back in my bookstore days, a young college student with whom I worked spoke of him as a god. But I'd never read any of Alexie's books since he hadn't yet written anything for children or YAs.
THE ABSOLUTE TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN is a semi-autobiographical tale by Sherman Alexie, written for teen readers, that is in turns wacked-out, funny, heartbreaking, and jubilant. It is the story of an Indian kid who has survived a precarious infancy and is growing up on a reservation outside Spokane. It is a powerful story of friendship between two teenage guys who have grown up together on the reservation. It is the story of Arnold's journey after he is persuaded by the math teacher to escape the rez school and transfer to a high school 22 miles away.
And it is a tale of two cities.
"So what was I doing in Reardan, whose mascot was an Indian, thereby making me the only other Indian in town?"
THE ABSOLUTE TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN portrays Arnold's struggle through that ninth grade school year to succeed at the high school in Reardan, to which he often has to walk and/or hitch. It could be that Arnold's greatest struggle involves the conflict and guilt that comes from living among the Indian kids and grown-ups he's seemingly left behind on the reservation in order to attain that success.
Arnold's humorous and telling drawings (thanks to artist Ellen Forney), which are "taped" into the diary, significantly bolster the book's boy-charm and permit us to see, in a second dimension, Arnold's view of his world.
"My head was so big that little Indian skulls orbited around it. Some of the kids called me Orbit. And other kids just called me Globe. The bullies would pick me up, spin me in circles, put their finger down on my skull, and say, 'I want to go there'."
I loved hanging out in Arnold World! Sherman Alexie and his quirky, in-your-face, first-person tale of contemporary life on and off the reservation are both important and extremely welcome additions to the world of young adult literature.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The Absolutely True Review of a Part-Time Teacher
By LauraLewWho
It seems that this book is very polarizing. This appears to be due to its treatment of sensitive issues surrounding religion and faith, race, disability, and debates raging around abuse and neglect, among other subjects.
Having taught high schoolers and college students, I found this book to be an accurate representation of the way young people perceive and relate to the world around them. Alexie touches on serious subjects, like race, gender, class, discrimination, disability, death, and family, simultaneously with his teenaged narrator's wit and humor, particularly in Ellen Forney's cartoons and caricatures. While some of this humor is crass, it is not inappropriate; nor is it any different from the way young people talk amongst themselves.
While I thought this novel could have spent more time dissecting and analyzing all of these issues (hence the lower rating), I must disagree with assessments that this subject matter is inappropriate or lascivious for middle and high schoolers. While it may not be appropriate for every pre-teen and teen to read, it is not pornographic or tasteless. Alexie, through his narrator, Junior, discusses what it means to be a young adult caught between two worlds. He does so in a way that does not omit, censor or make light of the less savory elements of puberty: his perceptions are honest and accurate. He and his friends communicate and experience life in a way that is not always "appropriate;" they discuss alcoholism, teen sexuality and disability in the same way that teenagers who are trying to find their place in the world do: as seriously as possible, and as humorously as possible when seriousness fails.
It is doing a disservice to teens to paint a picture of life that is always appropriate; life is not always appropriate. When your family struggles with alcoholism and poverty, or your loved ones die, or your friends deal with eating disorders or physical ailments they are unable to control, or your future, and that of those around you, is limited by forces beyond your control, life is not appropriate. This novel attempts to deal with the realities of life in a way that is imperfect and developing, but relatable and real despite all that.
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