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Title: Refuge : An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams ISBN: 0-679-74024-4 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 September, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.68 (28 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Powerful, intimate, important storytelling
Comment: An intimate telling of family and loss, courage and humor, honest confrontations with mortality, a deeply spiritual tone, and chapter titles introducing us to over thirty different birds, this beautifully descriptive and authentic tale leaves us with tears and a search for binoculars and a bird guidebook. Terry Tempest Williams weaves with great detail the heart breaking and life affirming events of the simultaneous devastation of her mother's body and the migratory bird sanctuary that has been her refuge. She skillfully keeps from dramatizing this innately powerful story. Williams had me deeply attached to pages I knew would be increasingly painful to read. Yet, as it became more painful, I would never describe it as depressing. I am struck by the powerful way she honors her mother, their family's reverent yet human journey through a particularly virulent cancer, and the ultimate power of nature, and equally important, humanity's thoughtless interference with nature, to turn one's life into a personal desert that used to be called home. She is a master storyteller and a poweful activist. This must read challenges the reader to enter a world where solutions are not simple, and life is exposed at its most vulnerable while courage and passion abound.
Rating: 5
Summary: A refuge becomes a sanctuary
Comment: As the Great Salt Lake rose to submerge and destroy the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, grief rose and submerged Terry Tempest William's spirit with the destruction of her mother and grandmother by cancer. The gradual regeneration of the Refuge with the subsiding of the lake parallels the regeneration of her spirit and the subsiding of her grief. But the pain and the scars remain and transform. Terry is no longer an accepting trusting Mormon daughter but a searching questioning activist after her tumultuous emotional experience. One wonders if the gifts of awareness and sensitivity are worth the price of the pain endured. The Refuge becomes a sanctuary for the returning birds and Terry's returning spirit. No more moving piece has been written about the folly and ultimate tragedy of human intervention in the environment. From the nuclear testing of the 1950s to the manipulation of the level of the Great Salt Lake, there is much to learn about the long term consquences of our short sighted acts. Everyone should read and reread and pass on this book.
Rating: 4
Summary: admirable
Comment: I give Ms. Williams points for her honesty. The book is at times insightful. Her relationship to the environment is admirable and her use of the Great Salt Lake as metaphor is quite poetic. Ms. William's ideas on solitude and our place in the landscape are something that I can relate to and appreciate. I too lost my mother to breast cancer in Utah. There is much about Ms. Williams that I admire.
I believe that this was her first book and it is often pretentious which is excusable in a first work. She over uses simile, as new writers often do, which only trivializes the piece. It is often disjointed which I am certain is how life felt to Ms. Williams as she lived through these simultaneous life changing events.
I recommend it as a loving tribute to Ms Williams's mother and the Utah landscape and as an honest portrayal of her personal growth in relationship.
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Title: Red : Passion and Patience in the Desert by Terry Tempest Williams ISBN: 0375725180 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: An Unspoken Hunger : Stories from the Field by Terry Tempest Williams ISBN: 0679752560 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland by Terry Tempest Williams, Clifford Brycelea ISBN: 0826309690 Publisher: University of New Mexico Press Pub. Date: June, 1987 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold ISBN: 0345345053 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 12 December, 1986 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: Leap by Terry Tempest Williams ISBN: 0679752579 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 18 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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