| Finding Beauty in a Broken World | 
 enlarge | Author: Terry Tempest Williams
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 10551
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0375420789
Dewey Decimal Number: 814
EAN: 9780375420788
ASIN: 0375420789
Publication Date: October 7, 2008
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Product Description
In her most original, provocative, and eloquently moving book since Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams gives us a luminous chronicle of finding beauty in a broken world. Always an impassioned and far-sighted advocate for a just relationship between the natural world and humankind, Williams has broadened her concerns over the past several years to include a reconfiguration of family and community in her search for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation.
Williams begins in Ravenna, Italy, where “jeweled ceilings became lavish tales” through the art of mosaic. She discovers that mosaic is not just an art form but a form of integration, and when she returns to the American Southwest, her physical and spiritual home, and observes a clan of prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, she apprehends an ecological mosaic created by a remarkable species in the sagebrush steppes of the Colorado Plateau. And, finally, Williams travels to a small village in Rwanda, where, along with fellow artists, she joins survivors of the 1994 genocide and builds a memorial literally from the rubble of war, an act that becomes a spark for social change and healing.
A singular meditation on how the natural and human worlds both collide and connect in violence and beauty, this is a work of uncommon perceptions that dares to find intersections between arrogance and empathy, tumult and peace, constructing a narrative of hopeful acts by taking that which is broken and creating something whole.
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| Customer Reviews:
Reassembly writ large January 2, 2009
For those of us who love Williams' work the arrival of a new volume is better than birthday cake, and her latest onced again delivers the mix of environmental sense, ethical sensibility and fearlessness that has characterized her work for decades. She cuts to the heart of issues and hearts, confronting her own culpability and failures as fully as she assaults those of our culture and specie.
The core metaphor of Finding Beauty is the mosaic: as art, as method, as ecosystem, as culture. In somewhat the same way that she tied Botacelli's "Garden of Delights" to her own life and that of Utah's wetlands in Leap, Williams here connects Italian mosaic art, the pending extinction of prairie dogs and the genocide in Rwanda in a compelling story of loss and renewal. Few writers can convincingly weave such disparate themes, and fewer still with Williams' success. She is, simply put, brilliant.
If there is a weakness in this book it is in a middle stretch where she has transcribed her field notes from two weeks of fourteen hour days spent observing a prairie dog town as part of a scientific research effort. While the long transcription will surely give some readers a better sense of the tedium of such work, as well as the necessity of persistent dedication, I fear she will lose many. In particular, first time readers of her work may not give her the benefit of the doubt in that stretch, and quit, not knowing that every page will prove worth it in the end. I would rank this one second to Leap in Williams' literary history, though her essay and collection titled "An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field" always make me second-guess my ordering of her works. Ah, Terry, you make me proud to be a human and a writer.
 What a journey I've been on.... November 6, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is a magical book....from Italy to Bryce Canyon to Rwanda...all along the path Terry took following her own muse, the same that took her to Spain (LEAP) and to Great Salt Lake (Refuge). This time her path led her to Louis Gakumba, a young Rwandan man, now living in Utah thanks to this book and Terry's inquiry. This book is the real thing. I couldn't get enough of it.
A Tale for our Time October 28, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is a wonderful book - a deeply personal yet soulful, a poet's journey into the world. Only a writer like TTW could have written something so intuitively timed for this day and age because she is utterly tuned into the planet's pace (see her very important OPEN SPACE OF DEMOCRACY). It is the gift of this writer to force us to slow down, to absorb peace and the consequences of violence in equal measure and to take stock of our own values. It is impossible not to read her work without a soul's level. Read this and be transformed.
Deeply Moral October 24, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Reading anything by Terry Tempest Williams, you know you're in the hands of a deeply moral writer. Her "Refuge" is one of my favorite books, linking the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake and its effects on its flora and fauna to the slow death of her mother from cancer induced by exposure to radiation.
She attempts something similar here, using brutal and inhumane attempts to kill off the prairie dogs of the plains and high desert as a counterpoint to the heinous war between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, which she visits after the media have moved on. The image she uses to portray life in the global 21st century is of mosaics, which she studied in Italy and takes with her to Africa. This work is less successful than Refuge, I think, because the magnitude of suffering she conveys after speaking with survivors of the Rwandan genocide is so overpowering. Another writer might have limited a book to that single topic, but Williams, a trained naturalist, is more ambitious; she wants to draw us into the interdependent web of life that covers the planet.
Cancer takes another of Williams' family members here, but the loss is balanced by a blessing that Williams and her husband, Brooke, thought they had foregone when they elected not to have children. (No, she didn't adopt a baby like some people with higher profiles.) Even if she goes on a bit too long about those cute prairie dogs (I skipped 20 pages), she makes the point eloquently that all life is fragile and that we must pay close attention to its value.
You might get the impression from reviews that Williams is sentimental. Quite the opposite, her observations of science and of life's brutality lend her work the edge that must have frightened the superintendent of Bryce Canyon into saying she wasn't welcome there. She went anyway, and we should be glad she's about in the world.
 transformative October 20, 2008
11 out of 23 found this review helpful
Terry Tempest Williams brings you through the making of mosaics in Ravenna, Italy; to the plateaus of Bryce Canyon observing prairie dogs; to a Rwandan village where she helps create a memorial to the genocide. The reader is given fragments to put together like a mosaic. Fragments of poetry, letters, newpaper articles, interviews/dialogs, and little reflective comments. I found myself going into my heart, going to a place of deep appreciation for the natural world, for plants, animals, rocks and human beings as I turned the pages.
She slows down the world with her poetic voice bringing a sharp focus to the essence of being. She provokes thought. She unravels the thread of cruelty to see no right, no wrong. She invites the reader to witness
the complexity of a situation and rise out of it with more compassion, more empathy and more consciousness.
It is a beautiful book that I highly recommend. It is transformative!
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