Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Paperback)

by Terry Tempest Williams (Author) "I recall an experiment from school: we filled a cup with water-the surface area of the contents was only a few square inches..." (more)
Key Phrases: pumping project, five nickels, snowy plovers, Great Salt Lake, Bear River, Bird Refuge (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (September 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679740244
• ISBN-13: 978-0679740247
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #131,446 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Makes you cry. Powerful and moving!, December 19, 2005

By	Steven R. McEvoy "MCWPP" (Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is so powerful and so moving, it brought me to tears in more than one place. This is an amazing story of place, family, love, and the desert. Last winter I had to read one of Williams' books for a course and have become addicted to her writings. Williams is a Mormon naturalist who pushes the boundaries of both, and her unique insights bring a freshness to both faith and preservation. I have tracked down and read all of her books that are currently in print, and this is the most powerful of them. Terry states in another book, "The great silences of the desert are not void of sound, but void of distractions." This book is about the silences and the distractions of death, the death of her mother and of the bird refuge that she loved and that was her solace. The chapter headings are unique, written as a journal, but not by date but by lake height. As the Great Salt Lake rose to record heights in the mid-1980's, Terry's mother was dying of cancer, and the Salt Lake's rising was flooding the Bear River Migratory Bird refuge. The refuge was sacred to Terry as a place she and her grandmother would visit together, and as a place to get alone outside of the city to reflect, meditate and believe.
Terry begins the prologue with "Everything about the Great Salt Lake is exaggerated - the heart, the cold, the salt, and the brine. It is a landscape so surreal one can never know what it is for certain. ... Most of the women in my family are dead. Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family." pg.3. This book chronicles one woman's love of the desert, of the bird refuge and of her family. It tells the story of cancer clusters in the desert where the US Government tested thousands of nuclear devices from the 1940's to the 60's.
Journey with one woman, through disease, death, destruction and the desert; journey with her both through the physical landscape and the internal one, to a new place- a place of determination and desire to make change and to grow from all she has been through.
Terry states in the epilogue, "I belong to a clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation." pg. 281. This is a story of a strong woman who shares her pain, and her strength, to help us all see what could be possible with the triumph of the human spirit.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Natural History, September 13, 2002

By	Michael Shea "Cancer Doc" (Phoenix, Arizona USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a unique book worth owning, reading, and pondering more than once. I am very grateful to Terry Williams for having had the courage to write it and have it published. I have had it added to our patient library.

As a medical and radiation oncologist with nearly a quarter century of experience, as a man whose parents died of unusual malignancies, and as the parent of a child with cancer, grief is a part of the experience of life with which I am well acquainted. This book is probably the most honest and eloquent expression of grief and the struggle of an extraordinarily sensitive woman with spirituality and loss as I have ever read. It is not without its faults, but even these are very revealing about the way human beings deal with a world in which change and loss are inevitable.

Faults? There are only two that come to mind. One is the title. There is nothing in this book that is unnatural in any way. Loss and sorrow are as natural as any other human experience. The second is the trap so many of us fall into of searching for cause and effect, a way to assuage grief by assigning blame that becomes evident in the final chapter. However, Mrs. Williams can be forgiven for that. She has left us with an insightful and lyrical account of her mother's illness and the comfort the beauty of the natural world brought to a daughter left alone. This is one woman with a sensitive and honest heart who is not afraid to let the rest of us look inside. There is much to be learned from what Mrs. Williams has written and Refuge is highly recommended.

By the way, Terry, one of your mother's doctors, Gary Johnson, delivered my son who was fortunate enough to survive his own battle with cancer 18 years later. It was a pleasure to see his name mentioned. Gary was one man for whom I had a lot of respect when I was a senior medical student at the University of Utah in 1977. Thanks very much for writing this book. You have my apology on the part of my profession for the stupidly insensitive way your mom was treated on certain occasions. And you have my gratitude and respect as well. I wish I had known you and your family when I was growing up in SLC.

MS

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Growing up in Southern Idaho/Northern Utah, February 17, 2000

By	Kristi Granados (Las Cruces, New Mexico (Idaho Native)) - See all my reviews

I grew up in the same area at about the same time as this author. I now live in New Mexico but I continue to return to this same area many times each year. Last September my own father died of cancer in Southern Idaho. My best friend had read this book prior to my father's death and held it back from me until now. I devoured this book, putting other activities aside, just finishing it last night. I am ordering it for several other friends and my mother who I think will be as touched by it as I was. If you are in to birds you will love the descriptions and ways she uses the different birds to represent the stages of change. If you are Mormon OR even non-Mormon from the area, you will appreciate the spirituality of the author who incorporates the development of her own spirituality into the network of the story.

Having just buried my dad, I wept while reading of her mother's illness, reliving my own father's long struggle with a cancer we couldn't identify. Be prepared to be struck by her descriptive and loving words. If you are grieving, you may wish to emmerse yourself in her words as I did. I feel better having flushed much of those lingering doubts from my head.