Beyond The Four Corners Of The World: A Navajo Woman's Journey

by Emily Benedek

In this compelling account of a remarkable woman and her struggle to find her place in the world, we follow Ella Bedonie from her childhood tending sheep in the high desert canyons of the Navajo Indian reservation and sleeping on hogan floors to the long, frightening bus ride to boarding school, and on into the white world and a college degree. We meet her grandparents and her parents, who plant corn and worship their gods much as their own grandparents did. We meet her husband and her children, whose lives straddle two worlds - ancient and modern, sacred and profane. As their stories unfold, we come to appreciate the Navajo society into which Ella was born - still in the 1950s an almost nineteenth-century world of visions and spirits, a world ordered by the unambiguous demands of religious tradition and ritual. We see that now, because of the genius of the Navajo culture for incorporating change, it is a world in which the established has made room for the new while at the same time maintaining its unique bond with the past.

Genres: Indigenous, Nonfiction

343 pages, Hardcover

First published August 22, 1995

About the author

Emily Benedek graduated from Harvard College. Her articles and essays have appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Vogue, The Dallas Morning News, Mosaic, Tablet magazine, and on NPR, among others. Her first book, The Wind Won’t Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute (Alfred a. Knopf, Inc.), was a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. Her books include Beyond the Four Corners of the World: A Navajo Woman’s Journey (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.), and a memoir, Through the Unknown, Remembered Gate (Schocken). She is also the author of Red Sea (St. Martins Press), a thriller about terrorism and counter-terrorism, and Hometown Betrayal: A Tragic Story of Secrecy and Abuse in Mormon Country, an Amazon Best Seller. She has two daughters and lives in New York City. For more information, go to www.emilybenedek.com

Reviews

[Kristen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's weird looking at this cover of my grandmother and reading the english version... my grandma has nothing to do with this book. The English title is "Beyond The Four Corners Of The World: A Navajo Woman's Journey" and it's about Ella Bedonie. I just don't understand why her picture is the book cover...