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May 9th, 2010 
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- ISBN13: 9780375725197
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
“Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision,” Terry Tempest Williams tells us. “Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together.” Ranging from Ravenna, Italy, where she learns the ancient art of mosaic, to the American Southwest, where she observes prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, to a small village in Rwanda where she joins genocide survivors to build a memorial from the rubble of war, Williams searches for meaning and commu… More >>
Finding Beauty in a Broken World
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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.
Rating: 4 / 5
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
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.
Rating: 3 / 5
I have been a Terry Tempest Williams fan for a number of years. She is more a weaver of stories than a writer in the classical, linear sense. I find it surprising how she can produce a coherent work from so disimilar strands. “Finding beauty in a broken world” has quite disimilar ingedients: Mosaic artwork, the life history of Praire Dogs, the death of a loved one to cancer and the genocide in Rwanda. The result is a rare book full of love, indignation and compassion and again, weaving comes more to mind than writing.
Rating: 5 / 5