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 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #110100 in Books
• Published on: 1992-09-01
• Released on: 1992-09-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.98" h x .67" w x 5.11" l, .53 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Amazon.com
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.

From Library Journal
Williams, a naturalist at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City, uses the rise and fall of Great Salt Lake and the fluctuations in wild bird populations that inhabit or migrate through the ecosystem as a personal metaphor. Her diary-like personal reflections cover such issues as helping family members through the traumatic process of living and dying with cancer. She also reflects upon women's place within the Mormon Church and touches on citizens' conflicting civic responsibilities as stewards and exploiters of the earth. Finally, she ponders federal responsibility for irradiating Utah land and people during 11 years of above-ground atomic testing. Williams's book is difficult to pigeonhole because she wrestles with a wide range of ethical questions in her struggle to find understanding. Her book may be of particular interest to public libraries in Southwestern states.--Laurie Tynan, Montgomery Cty.
Norristown P.L., Pa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.