About the Author

Ellen Meloy is also the author of The Anthropology of Turquoise

Reviews

A thoughtful recounting of one woman's travels in the post-Cold War American West . . . Meloy's wanderings take her to the back roads of the desert Southwest, to hidden canyons where Navajo witchcraft and toxic waste reign side by side, and to little towns where uranium miners wait for cancer to claim them. . . . Meloy has not only rediscovered her connection to the badlands--she's also made a fine book in the bargain. --Kirkus ReviewsMeloy celebrates the stark beauty and plumbs the deadly ironies of the Colorado Plateau with words as piercing as the thorns of a claret-cup cactus. Her prickly, penetrating style reflects a deep but unsentimental love for the land she shares with bighorn sheep and Navajo skinwalkers. . . . An intense regional attachment has rarely carried weightier global implications. --BooklistA painful juxtaposition of natural beauty and warrior wastelands. --New York Times Book ReviewEloquent, enlightening, full of irony and insight. --Portland OregonianNot only is it well constructed and finely written, it is filled with ideas and perceptions that should wake the sleepy intellect in anyone with an open, inquisitive mind. And some of her passages are pure poetry. --Santa Fe New Mexican