The Blessing Way (Joe Leaphorn #1) (audiobook) by Tony Hillerman















Published by Borders/Recorded books in 1990.
Narrated by George Guidall.
Duration: Approximately 6 hours, 30 minutes.
Unabridged

The Blessing Way is the first of the Leaphorn books but, ironically, Leaphorn is a mere supporting character throughout most of the second half of the book. College professor/archaeologist Bergen McKee is the main character - the one who has the most growth and teaches the reader the most about Navajo society and culture.
Tony Hillerman (1925-2008)
Nevertheless, The Blessing Way is an enjoyable book. I have read all of Hillerman's books at one time or another so I am going back and listening to some of the older ones as a high-quality diversion from my boring work commute.

 I intentionally picked this one, the oldest of the series, since I recently read and reviewed the newest of the series (The Shapeshifter), which, ironically enough, also prominently featured the Navajo Wolf/Witch/Shapeshifter. His descriptions of Navajo society in the two books would make an interesting comparison - a study in the ongoing process of diffusion of Belagana (white) culture throughout the reservation.

 I figured out who did it with about an hour to an hour and a half of listening to go. However, that did not dim my enthusiasm for listening to an exciting escape, a chase through the desert and a great climax.

 George Guidall did a strong job of reading the story - his pacing and ability to convey the appropriate emotion of the story were quite good.  I enjoy his readings of the Leaphorn/Chee series.

 I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman.

 Reviewed on December 20, 2006.

Comments

  1. robfuscateJanuary 1, 2017 at 12:43 AM

    Is this version abridged or unabridged?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DWDJanuary 15, 2017 at 4:59 PM

      Unabridged. Hillerman's books aren't very long.

      Delete
    2. DWDJanuary 15, 2017 at 5:02 PM

      I will edit the review to reflect that. Sometimes I forget to note that on my audiobook reviews.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

STAR TREK PICARD: NO MAN'S LAND: AN ORIGINAL AUDIO DRAMA (audiobook) by Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson

Image
Published by Simon and Schuster Audio Originals in 2022. Performed by a full cast, including Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd. Duration: 1 hour, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Set immediately after the Star Trek streaming show Picard: Season One , the audiobook  No Man's Land is an adventure featuring the characters Seven of Nine and Raffi.  With the collapse of the Romulan Empire comes the rise of local Romulan warlords who are trying to assert their control over the Romulan territory and, just as important, lay claim to the Romulan brand.  A Romulan who has taken the title Emperor is conquering/leveling various planets in an attempt to establish himself as the successor to the Romulan Empire. It looks he is heading towards a planet that is secretly holding a massive collection of written materials, museum pieces, and other cultural relics of the collapsed Romulan Empire.  There is a mad scramble to remove the relics, led by an ancient, kindly professor of unknown or...
Read more

THE HINDENBURG DISASTER: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
Published in July of 2025 by Hourly History. Hourly History specializes in little histories that take about an hour to read. For me, an hour of reading about the Hindenburg is about right.  The Hindenburg Disaster is a short history that details the beginnings of zeppelins/blimps through the tragedy of the complete destruction of the German zeppelin Hindenburg in just 32 seconds in New Jersey in 1937.  Germany was a focal point for building blimps/zeppelins during World War I and before World War II. The blimps went from being potential military airships to being experimental ways to travel. One has to remember that airplanes were even more experimental way to travel. Any sort of air travel was going to be prohibitively expensive - only the richest of the rich could afford it. Blimps/zeppelins offered a stately, luxurious ride - planes were seen as a noisy and cramped and inferior alternative. This short history chronicles the struggles of the blimp/zeppelin industry during t...
Read more

The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II by Judith M. Heimann

Image
Originally Published in 2007 An odd and interesting bit of history from the Pacific Front in World War II The Airmen and the Headhunters: A True Story of Lost Soldiers, Heroic Tribesmen and the Unlikeliest Rescue of World War II   is a well-researched telling of the story of two sets of American fliers (one Army and one Navy) who were shot down over Borneo by the Japanese. The survivors end up living with the Dayaks, the famous headhunters of the highlands of Borneo. Borneo was largely unmapped and unknown to the West. It was, and still is, one of the remotest locations on earth. Most of Borneo's interior is like the old line, "You can't get there from here." Well, you can if you jump out of an airplane. The author, Judith Heimann doing research in Borneo The author, Heimann, does a good job of giving the reader a feel for the Dayak way of life, but the shortage of maps makes the story of the soldiers being moved from village to village for their protection a...
Read more

TYRANNY, INC.: HOW PRIVATE POWER CRUSHED AMERICAN LIBERTY - AND WHAT to DO ABOUT IT (audiobook) by Sohrab Ahmari

Image
Published in 2023 by Random House Audio. Read by the author, Sohrab Ahmari. Duration: 7 hours, 30 minutes. Unabridged. Writing about government overreach is a common theme among conservatives like Sohrab Ahmari. In Tyranny, Inc . he switches gears and writes about overreach from the private sector instead.  He talks about predatory hedge funds that purchase reasonably healthy companies, load them with debt, and then let them die. He tells the pathetic story of the decline and fall of both Sears and K-Mart, but it's happened over and over again with multiple companies. He also talks about a number of court cases, legal rulings, new laws, and relatively new interpretations of laws that have slid the balance of societal power to private corporations. He gives tons of examples like expansive Non-Disclosure Agreements, tracking software on employee's private phones because they are forced to use them for work, and hidden clauses in multi-page employment agreements that give employer...
Read more

SEPARATION of CHURCH and HATE: A SANE PERSON'S GUIDE to TAKING BACK the BIBLE from FUNDAMENTALISTS, FASCISTS, and FLOCK-FLEECING FRAUDS (audiobook) by John Fugelsang

Image
Published in August of 2025 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, John Fugelsang. Duration: 9 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. John Fugelsang is seemingly omnipresent on the cable TV news/political talk show circuit. He is a talented debater because he knows how to bring the goods to an argument, especially when Christian Nationalism is involved. Fugelsang had a unique upbringing in a super-Catholic household. Why was it unusual? His mother was a former nun and his father was a former Franciscan friar. They fell in love, had a bunch of kids, and made sure that they all went to church whenever it was having a service.  In a a lot of ways, this felt a lot like my childhood. No - my parents weren't nuns or priests. But, I grew up in rural setting where my Lutheran church was one of the centers of my life. Church every weekend, most of the holiday services, Sunday school, Christmas programs, church youth group, vacation bible school, and I worked at a church summer camp for fi...
Read more

THE GOLEM'S VOICE (graphic novel) by David G. Klein

Image
  Published in 2015 by Now What Media, LLC Synopsis: Set in Czechoslovakia during World War II, The Golem's Voice  is the story of a young Jewish mom and her two sons trying to escape relocation by the Nazis. This was in the time when the Nazis were still telling Jews that they were relocating them to alternate settlements rather than just taking them to work and death camps. As they are being loaded onto trains, the mom gets a bad feeling and tells her boys (Yoakim and Yakov) to just run. She does not join them because they are much faster than her and she just wants them to escape and live. Her boys run under the trains and, at first, things look good. But, soon enough, Nazi soldiers are in full pursuit and Yoakim is shot providing cover for his little brother. Yakov continues to run to the only place the knows - the Jewish ghetto neighborhood that he just came from. He hears a voice in his head calling him to the home of a long-dead rabbi named Yudah Loew . Legend has it th...
Read more

ELEVEN NUMBERS: A SHORT STORY (kindle) by Lee Child

Image
To be published by Amazon Original Stories in February of 2025. If you have Amazon Prime, you get to choose from a limited selection of soon-to-be-published e-books every month. I am a big fan of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books, so I jumped at the chance to get this short story by Lee Child. I believe I have read every book and every short story that Lee Child has written about Jack Reacher, but I don't think I've read anything he's written that didn't feature Reacher. In fact, I didn't know he wrote about any character but Reacher. This is the story of a mathematician - a college professor. He's kind of a nobody, except that he has a specialty, some would say a gift, in an obscure little corner of mathematics. Not many people have even heard of it, let alone know anything about it.  Then, one day, he gets a call from the White House... My review: This was a quick story. It is well-written and takes several twists and turns that I did not see coming.  It'...
Read more

THE DAWN of EVERYTHING: A NEW HISTORY of HUMANITY (audiobook) by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Image
  Published by Macmillan Audio in 2021. Read by Mark Williams. Duration: 24 hours, 2 minutes. Unabridged . In my professional life I am a high school history teacher. I don't teach it now (I teach another subject), but in the past when I taught world history I taught that the origins of civilization in the traditional way and it always goes something like this: -At first there were wandering groups of people, probably based around 1 or 2 families. Things were fairly democratic because these groups had to talk things out to make decisions. -Somebody along the way figured out how to domesticate a few animals. -Somebody along the way figured out how to domesticate plants. Some small fields were started and left mostly on their own while the wandering continued with scheduled returns to the fields. -Eventually, the fields were so productive that it made no sense to leave them. -Populations grew, towns were developed and simple authoritarian government led by almost always by a man who ...
Read more

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES: HOW DECENT PEOPLE CAN SAVE AMERICA from the CULTURE of CONTEMPT (audiobook) by Arthur C. Brooks

Image
Published by HarperAudio in March of 2019. Read by Will Damron. Duration: 6 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Arthur C. Brooks was the President of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute from 2008 to shortly after the publication of this book in 2019.  Brooks is deeply worried with the present level of political discourse in America. Debates where the candidates just insult one another. Derogatory comments rather than actual proposals. Look at your typical Facebook political argument. Anonymous posters with names like "Trump_2020_Forever" arguing with "Trumpsters_Suck" and using terms like "libtards" and "conservacunts" while they insist that the other side is nothing but a literal bunch of communists and Nazis. This is getting us nowhere. And that is his point in Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt . What we are showing each other is contempt. He quotes a couples' counselor ...
Read more

BRIONNE (audiobook) by Louis L'Amour

Image
Originally published in 1968. Audiobook published in 2016 by Random House Audio. Read by Erik Singer. Duration: 4 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Major James Brionne is a Virginian and a confidante of President Ulysses S. Grant. He helped pacify the region immediately after the war, including hanging a criminal named Allard. The rest of the Allard family gang, bushwackers from the brutal Missouri theater of the Civil War, comes to Virginia to kill Brionne. They don't find Brionne, but they do find his wife and son at Brionne's plantation house. She takes out one of the Allard gang and then kills herself rather than be brutalized by them. The Allard gang never finds Brionne's son, who had hidden himself in a little cave nearby. Brionne decides he needs a massive change of scenery. He takes his son out West on a train, to a region he had explored as part of a military mission years earlier. He wants to find a place to start over with his son - Utah. But, Briolle gets t...
Read more