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Loading... Refugeby Terry Tempest Williams
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A thoughtfully written memoir by naturalist Terry Tempest Williams, detailing her experiences while dealing with the slow death of her mother and other female relatives, due to cancer. At the same time, the Great Salt Lake in her home state of Utah starts to rise to record heights, and the government struggles to find ways to get rid of the extra water. Williams' book is a collection of little observations, feelings, and emotions. Williams finds peace and solace in the wilderness, like many members of her family. While the usual happiness and peace of her family is slowly broken up by her mother's long battle with cancer, so is the usual peace of the land. Williams has to deal with her favorite wildlife and wilderness spots changing, just as the landscape of her family changed as well. Her mother goes through a heartbreaking process of dealing with her illness that anyone who has dealt with cancer (or anyone who has any empathy!) will understand and feel deeply along with her. (  ) akandy | Jul 14, 2009 |  This book broke my heart. Nature, family, cancer, strength, mothers, grief, floods of salt water and tears. Williams' spare, gorgeous prose drives her readers through the pages, even though some of the material is emotionally difficult. (  ) nilchance | Mar 16, 2009 | Meaningful and tender. I read this after losing my mother and it resonated. (  ) stellaphant | Mar 7, 2009 | In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that has become a classic. TunstallSummerReads | May 15, 2008 | Beautiful story of the land and of a family. Naturalist books are sometimes boring for me, but the way she mixed in the landscape with her family's story was wonderful. The epilogue seemed a bit of a departure that left it on a bad note, but in general the book was wonderful. ( ) amberlinabooks | Apr 10, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0679740244, Paperback)The only constants in nature are change and death. Terry Tempest Williams, a naturalist and writer from northern Utah, has seen her share of both. The pages of Refuge resound with the deaths of her mother and grandmother and other women from cancer, the result of the American government's ongoing nuclear-weapons tests in the nearby Nevada desert. You won't find the episode in the standard history textbooks; the Feds wouldn't admit to conducting the tests until women and men in Utah, Nevada, and northwestern Arizona took the matter to court in the mid-1980s, and by then thousands of Americans had fallen victim to official technology. Parallel to her account of this devastation, Williams describes changes in bird life at the sanctuaries dotting the shores of the Great Salt Lake as water levels rose during the unusually wet early 1980s and threatened the nesting grounds of dozens of species. In this world of shattered eggs and drowned shorebirds, Williams reckons with the meaning of life, alternating despair and joy.(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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