When I was in high school, my friend Will gave me a book that I've since grown to love, called Reservation Blues. The motivation was, I think, that I had given him a mix CD with a Robert Johnson song on it. Reservation Blues is the story of a couple of down-and-out Spokane reservation Indians who receive a magical guitar from Robert Johnson and form a blues band. They travel around the Pacific Northwest and learn, you know, stuff about life.
I immediately loved Sherman Alexie, both for his work and his amazingly outspoken public persona. His book of short stories, Ten Little Indians, is also one of my favorites, and my mother has spoken highly of his young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Alexie keeps a pretty cool website, www.shermanalexie.com, which contains his blog and some general biographical info.
He made news recently for denouncing digital versions of books, as you can see in this clip of him on the Colbert Report:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/257719/december-01-2009/sherman-alexie
...where he says that none of his books are available for digital download. He points out, and rightly so, that we should all be paranoid of having our entire lives (like text messages, what we're reading, who our friends are, etc) all on one device that anyone with half a brain could hack. "I'm an Indian. I have plenty of reasons to fear the government."
Alexie also apparently is a great public speaker, and I'd like to see him in person someday. His speeches are a combination of stand-up, social commentary, and literary critcism. Speaking at Cornell last year, he spoke about the unacknowledged genocide of American Indians. "He demanded an acknowledgment of the genocide that wiped out entire tribes of people. 'Where is our roomful of moccasins?' asked Alexie, referring to the Holocaust Museum’s powerful room full of shoes that illustrates the thousands of lives lost in Nazi extermination camps."
http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/41972527.html <<--Full article here
More than anything, Alexie writes eloquently about poverty, isolation, ruralism, and post 9/11 attitudes towards "brown people" that few other American others could ever hope to touch.
He's a cool dude. Everyone should read his stuff.
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