Customer Reviews

Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Vintage)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's so hard to give Ms. Williams anything less than five stars. At her best, she's a fabulous writer, with a deep moral consciousness. But in this case, her editor should have given her a stern ultimatum: "Terry, I'm sorry, but there are lots of people who do NOT want to read 100 pages of field notes from the two weeks you spent watching prairie dogs, and we are NOT going to publish them." The beginning of this book is fantastic. The end? Well, the middle is so painfully slow that I'm not there yet. I'm only halfway through her stint with the prairie dogs, and I put it down for a week until I have the strength to continue.

This book is at the highest end of my bookshelf, sharing space with only the greatest. I was immersed from the moment I started reading. I am biased in that I know and deeply love Ravenna. I soon discovered how even, in Terry's writing style, she used mosaics within her words and fragments which, to me, made it even more powerful. The messages to see, better observe and appreciate the restoration of broken images, no matter how long ago or how recent they had been created and destroyed. To focus that what is broken can always be healed as long as we see what is there, not what we wish but what we learn to see. And as long as we are willing to look at each fragment with care of not only the heart, but mind and prior knowledge, there is hope.
The middle section about the prairy dogs I found interesting for a while (I love those little creatures), then became utterly bored. I saw the picture but was finished. I could not understand the style. I didn't bother completing it.
Rwanda was an experience that I find doubtful for anyone to forget. Again: detail for feelings, society and societal relationships were awe-inspiring. It's history brought tears to my eyes many times. The beauty of the mosaic memorial, intertwined with the mosaics of the Rwandan people's healing lives was also healing to me. Incredible in so many aspects.

Then I realized I had to go back to the little guys out west. It was then that I understood the writing style (somewhat scientific as opposed to narrative). The picture is only too clear, and so fitting in the setting of the book.
Bravo, Terry. I feel privileged to have become part of that world. I am also going to Ravenna to take the class! It will have yet a different meaning!

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.

Finding Beauty in A Broken World is a beautifully written post-modern text. It is Terry Tempest William's reflections on three different areas of her life that all relate to each other under the overarching idea of mosaic. She defines a mosaic as something beautiful pieced together by broken pieces and fragments of something else. The novel opens with William's in Italy learning the art of mosaic from an expert. Working the old fashioned way, with chisel in hand, Williams has a profound experience as she creates something beautiful from something broken.
This concept translates to her life back in America and her passion for prairie dogs. As I read this book I was taken aback by the abrupt change. How can she transition from beautiful Italian mosaics and stained glass in gorgeous ancient churches to a biological tutorial on Prairie Dogs? She tells us all about the different kinds of prairie dogs, their origins and the great danger of extinction that they are facing.
Williams spent two weeks doing nothing but observing a prairie dog colony in Bryce Canyon, UT. A large portion of the text is comprised of her field notes. And her accounts of the colony are beautiful. She then travels to Rwanda where she experiences life after genocide. She and her team find beauty in this broken land and culture, and help a small village find the light that they had lost. The parallels drawn between the prairie dogs, Italy, and Rwanda are striking. This is an introspective text that moves slowly at time, but if you put in the effort this book is truly an experience in and of itself.

After hearing an up-close-and-personal reading from Terry Tempest Williams herself, I scrambled to find a copy of one of her books--any of them! My first stop was this delightful work of creative nonfiction: Finding Beauty in a Broken World. From Ravenna, Italy to her home state, Utah, and on to the rest of the world, Williams discovers the earth's splendor in the unpredictable forms this critic has never seen elaborated upon. Throughout the text, Williams employs clever word arrangement both in syntax and in word and space placement on the page to denote an overall sentiment of mosaic, a main exploratory focus of Williams that shines its refracted light throughout the narrative. On top of placing tesserae into limestone and feeling her eyes brighten to the unique reflection of light through opaque glass, Williams explores the mosaic forms of the environment in her thorough study of prairie dogs, an endangered species familiar to her home state. And the wonder of this work of prose is exactly that: William's ability to eloquently compare Italian mosaics to Utahn prairie dogs, capturing readers into a world of unlikely but remarkable comparisons.
Finding Beauty in a Broken World highlights the interstices between pieces of glass, the filling that cements life experiences together into one work of art. Williams notices first the ornate, but then the austere elements of a world she calls broken, and in doing so, turns the imperfections from dull and dreary to glistening and gleaming. Finding Beauty in a Broken World is a perspective-changing work of art you won't want to miss.

Perhaps only Terry Tempest Williams could weave a coherent and compelling story from these seemingly unrelated parts: the broken chunks of stone and glass that form a mosaic, the language and social lives of a colony of Utah prairie dogs, and the aftermath of genocide in Rawanda so horrible I can't imagine what it must have been like.

"A mosaic," Tempest Williams writes at the beginning of the book, "is a conversation between what is broken." That's a wise and beautiful way to open a book that is her personal response to the events of 9/11. She begins with the study of mosaics and mosaic-making in Ravenna, Italy. After learning how to cut the stone and glass tesserae into the shapes of the design she has picked, she realizes she has to train her eye to pick out the individual colors and patterns of the tesserae and discern how what seems a jumble close-up becomes a vivid picture from the viewing distance.

From seeing the whole picture in the broken pieces that make up mosaics, Tempest Williams moves to watching Utah prairie dogs, one of the most unloved species in her own home landscape. Beginning with the facts of their lives and the devastation to their habitat, as well as the disdain in which these social, communicative rodents are held--including by the men in her family--Tempest Williams weaves the story of what prairie dogs mean to the mosaic of the landscapes where they live. The 200 wildlife species associated with their tunneling "towns," the way their burrows channel water deep into the soil to recharge groundwater tables, the fact that their engineering, their constant turning of the soil fertilizes it, the way their feeding increases the productivity of the plants they graze on. Their complex array of sounds that researchers consider a detailed language, able to convey not only that a person is walking toward their burrows, but details of that person's gait and dress.

The entire middle section of the book is taken up by William's detailed notes as she spends days watching a Utah prairie dog town as part of a research project, observing all the individuals, their habits and interactions, their care for each other, their play, the way they watch the world around them with their huge eyes, the details of their daily lives. Through her observations, the prairie dogs that are routinely gassed in their burrows, poisoned, shot, and trapped by the thousands come alive as individuals with stories of their own. Characters we want to know.

Clay-colored monks
dressed in discreet robes of fur
stand as sentinels
outside their burrows, watching,
watching as their communities
disappear, one by one,
their hands raised up
in prayer.

From prairie dogs as spiritual sentinels to devastation, to William's brother Stephen's death from cancer, from Stephen's death to Rwanda with its unimaginable genocide, where she helps build a monument of reconciliation, Williams takes each broken piece and carefully, mindfully lays them into a pattern that will grip readers until the very last word. The pattern: beauty, the beauty of human kindness, of forgiveness, of love offered and received.

But that's not the whole story. The gift Williams discovers in Rawanda, a place she feared to approach with her already wounded heart, is one she is terrified to accept, one that calls on her whole being, one that she and her husband Brooke must embrace together. I'll give this much away: they do embrace the gift, and the grace they receive from that gift is what finally makes this story of finding beauty in the horribly broken land and culture of Rawanda touch heart and soul.

Find the time to read this book. You won't be sorry; you might be changed. That's okay.

by Susan J. Tweit
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

Finding Beauty in a Broken World, by Terry Tempest Williams, begins and ends with art. Her deep and thoughtful prose carries our understanding in directions it might not otherwise travel. We follow her, first to Italy, where she studies the ancient art of mosaic--the art of making something beautiful from what has been broken. Thoughts on mosaics and the making of beauty thread through the following essays--where next--we learn about the plight of our indigenous prairie dogs. These creatures are often considered vermin; however, they are keystone species for our short grass prairie. Many forms of life depend on the ecological mosaics created by prairie dogs. The destruction of prairie dog towns has resulted in intense ecological damage that affects watersheds and soil quality. Then we visit Rwanda in the midst of their healing from genocide. We watch as a group of Bare Foot Artists teach survivors to create art. With them, we can be transformed, by creating beauty from what has been broken. (Pantheon Books, New York, 2008)