Refuge
Book 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…
Why read it?
4 authors picked Refuge as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Reading Terry Tempest Williams’ book brought me an intimate awareness of the magical beauty of The Great Salt Lake ecosystem and its abundant, fascinating bird life, while at the same time, the book educated me about the long-term impacts on both wildlife and human life from all who lived downwind of the 1950’s Western nuclear weapons testing and development.
I loved the themes of wild bird habitats and migratory bird refuges that ran throughout the book, and I truly felt the emotive connection that Williams created between wild birds and human lives.
The honesty about increased cancer rates and the…
One of the things I love about his book is that Ms. Williams is a woman with a huge heart, who isn’t scared to write it down on paper. As a writer, I know how challenging it can be to bare yourself so deeply.
This story chronicles events over a two-year period when the Great Salt Lake rose and flooded wildlife habitats. She writes about the north end of the Great Salt Lake with such a feeling that she made me love that part of the earth, a place I’d never been.
She describes it with emotion that made me…
From HJ's list on people who really hug trees.
Finishing out the nonfiction—though I leave thousands undiscussed here—is Terry Tempest Williams’ seminal Refuge: An Unnatural History of Place. Bold and original in its direct comparisons between the personal and the ecological, the memoir chronicles the deterioration of Williams’ beloved mother, Diane Tempest, to ovarian cancer at the same time their shared landscape, the Bear River marshes of the Great Salt Lake where three generations of the Tempest had gloried in birding expeditions, were succumbing to record flooding. The memoir also details the exposure of Williams and her mother—her entire family—to radioactive fallout from the U.S. government’s atomic testing…
From Rick's list on resistance.
Since Virgil’s Georgics, nature writing has largely consisted of dispatches of pastoral splendor to soothe the jangled urban soul. It tended to be nostalgic for a lost Arcadia, some former, purer world. Writing about the sky, it didn’t mention the contrails. In a time of mass extinction and climate change, to remain relevant, nature writing needed to address the actual situation, but how to do it without being so depressing no one would read it? Terry Tempest Williams made this shift in a profound and beautiful way with this first book, edited by the late Dan Frank. How Williams…
From Jordan's list on living with the threat of environmental collapse.
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