Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deep, 21 Mar 2008
This book is so powerful and so moving, it brought me to tears in more than one place. This is an amazing story of place, family, love, and the desert. Last winter I had to read one of Williams' books for a course and have become addicted to her writings. Williams is a Mormon naturalist who pushes the boundaries of both, and her unique insights bring a freshness to both faith and preservation. I have tracked down and read all of her books that are currently in print, and this is the most powerful of them. Terry states in another book, "The great silences of the desert are not void of sound, but void of distractions." This book is about the silences and the distractions of death, the death of her mother and of the bird refuge that she loved and that was her solace. The chapter headings are unique, written as a journal, but not by date but by lake height. As the Great Salt Lake rose to record heights in the mid-1980's, Terry's mother was dying of cancer, and the Salt Lake's rising was flooding the Bear River Migratory Bird refuge. The refuge was sacred to Terry as a place she and her grandmother would visit together, and as a place to get alone outside of the city to reflect, meditate and believe.
Terry begins the prologue with "Everything about the Great Salt Lake is exaggerated - the heart, the cold, the salt, and the brine. It is a landscape so surreal one can never know what it is for certain. ... Most of the women in my family are dead. Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family." pg.3. This book chronicles one woman's love of the desert, of the bird refuge and of her family. It tells the story of cancer clusters in the desert where the US Government tested thousands of nuclear devices from the 1940's to the 60's.
Journey with one woman, through disease, death, destruction and the desert; journey with her both through the physical landscape and the internal one, to a new place- a place of determination and desire to make change and to grow from all she has been through.
Terry states in the epilogue, "I belong to a clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation." pg. 281. This is a story of a strong woman who shares her pain, and her strength, to help us all see what could be possible with the triumph of the human spirit.
(First Published in Imprint 2005-11-18 as 'A tale of true inner strenght')
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deep connections between family, the landscape and death., 24 April 1999
By A Customer
I had the pleasure of attening an Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1999 at which Terry Tempest Williams spoke. Her understanding of the connection of the human species and the earth on which we live was particularly moving. Her comment on the events of this week, the national sorrow amidst the shootings in Colorado were timely and poignant. I live only a few miles from the Bear River Refuge. This living, breathing landscape is truly as stark, beautiful and peaceful as Williams describes. The lessons of this refuge...the ability of our broken planet to carry on with life and nuturing and sustinance...and to recognize that our connection to this earth is undeniable will someday make events of this week unimaginable.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Refuge: An "Unnaturally" Great Nature Story, 25 Aug 1998
By A Customer
The subtitle to Refuge calls it "An unnatural history of family and place". I think this describes it well, though the full meaning of this phrase remains a mystery until the end. The author parallels the ups and downs of the Great Salt Lake, where she works at a bird refuge, to the ups and downs of living with a dying mother and history of cancer in the family. "Refuge" is found in various forms, internal and external, an important one being the outdoors. Though not always directly a story about nature, the complex relationship with a troubled land is expressed through the story of this family tied to the earth by its Mormon heritage and need for escape. The book raises numerous gender and culture issues while the author shows how these people are inextricably tied to the land. I really liked this book. The style of the writing was poetic and pleasing, and it was delivered in a way that consciously expressed the centrality of the landscape to the author's life. I like how it operates as environmental argument focused on how nature affects one's life. I found Refuge compelling and disturbing and enjoying, as it was surely intended to be.
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