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Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
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About Refuge: An Unnatural History Of Family And Place
Product Description 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 Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and 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. Amazon.com Review 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. From Publishers Weekly Utah naturalist Williams ponders the loss of her mother to cancer and the disastrous flooding of a bird refuge in a moving account of the interrelations between personal tragedy and natural history. Author tour. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review "There has never been a book like Refuge, an entirely original yet tragically common story, brought exquisitely to life." —San Francisco Chronicle "Moving and loving... both a natural history of an ecological phenomenon [and] a Mormon family saga... A heroic book." —The Washington Post Book World"A record of loss, healing grace, and the search for a human place in nature's large design. Terry Tempest Williams's courage is matched by the earnest beauty of her language and the keen compassion of her observations." —Louise Erdrich "The wonderful thing about Refuge is that Terry Williams is too full of life herself, and too fascinated by all its manifestations, to write a gloomy book. There isn't a page in Refuge that doesn't whistle with the sound of wings." —Wallace Stegner "Brilliantly conceived... one of the most significant environmental essays of our time." —The Kansas City Star From the Publisher "Remarkable....Her demonstration of how deeply human emotional life can become intertwined with a particular landscape could not be more relevant to our lives."--Barry Lopez "Profoundly moving...one of the most significant environmental essays of our time."--Kansas City Star From the Inside Flap 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. From the Back Cover In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams
