EMILY BENEDEK
Four airplanes are blown out of the sky—hundreds of civilians are dead, and the world is gripped by fear. As young American reporter Marie Peterssen investigates the attacks, she meets Julian Granot, a mysterious Israeli operative who offers her an enticing lead—one that points them to maverick FBI agent Morgan Ensley and the ravages of war-torn Iraq. Soon Marie, Julian, and Morgan discover a connection between the crashes and a devastating plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in a New York City port—and time is running out. As Marie races to understand a sophisticated terror network, she stumbles upon a shocking revelation: She may have a deep personal connection to the Islamic mastermind behind the attacks. Now she will stop at nothing to uncover the truth. But it could cost Marie and her team the mission…and their lives.
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MORE BY EMILY BENEDEK
"The wind won't know me there. The Holy People won't know me. And I won't know the Holy People. And there's no one left who can tell me."
— an old Navajo woman
For the past twenty years, our country’s last Indian war has been raging in the territory around Big Mountain and Coal Mine Mesa, Arizona, pitting Navajos against their Hopi neighbors--and against a United States government that had heartlessly divided the land between two tribes and then decreed that Indians who lived on the "wrong" side would have to move. In that struggle, Emily Benedek finds a powerful metaphor for the experience of Native Americans since 1492.With the narrative sweep and emotional veracity of a great novel, The Wind Won't Know Me recounts the tortuous progress of the Navajo-Hopi land dispute and portrays the lives it has consumed. Out of its many stories--Indian and Anglo, Navajo and Hopi--comes a stunning work of reportage that is bound to become a classic in the literature about Native America.
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.
In telling Ella's story, Emily Benedek, author of the acclaimed The Wind Won't Know Me, shows how this careful balance is threatened when a government relocation program moves Ella and her family into a suburban housing development. We witness firsthand how she is thrown into a crisis that pits her religious beliefs and family ties against the lures of materialism and modernity, and forces her to make a decision that will profoundly affect all their lives.
Beyond the Four Corners of the World offers us a poignant lesson about the endurance of tradition and belief, and the resounding power of the past.
Emily Benedek, the author of two highly regarded books on the traditions and conflicts of Native Americans of the Southwest, found herself in the mid-1990s grappling with certain traditions and conflicts of her own. Stricken with a case of temporary blindness, she had an experience–unprecedented in her life–which she was able to understand only as an apprehension of the divine.
Stirred and confused, Benedek took herself to a humble storefront synagogue in Dallas, where she was then living. Among the welcoming congregants she began a spiritual journey that gradually led her back to Jewish practice and belief.
As we accompany Benedek on her journey, we come to know the wise and imaginative psychoanalyst who served as one of her guides... an Orthodox family in Rockland County whose lives are devoted entirely to Torah yet who are open to Benedek's questioning and probing, particularly on the subject of the differing roles of men and women in Orthodoxy... Texans, Israelis, and Brooklynites, teachers and students, and the vibrant Conservative Congregation B'nai Jeshurun on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
And ultimately, of course, we come to know Emily Benedek, an independent and principled modern woman who has found a path through T. S. Eliot's "unknown, remembered gate" in the Jewish life and identity that connect her to her rich and powerful heritage. Curious, sensitive, perceptive, and questing, she gives us in this compelling memoir a beautiful story, beautifully told.