Rating: 
Summary: Timely, elegaic warning to us all
Review: An exquisite, heartbreaking story, peppered with stark and terrifying facts: we are destroying each other and our home, the Earth. It's no accident that cancer rates have skyrocketed since the advent of atomic weaponry. I felt a sense of imprisonment as I read Terry's story....There are fewer and fewer beautiful, natural spaces to come home to on this planet. Our kind are destroying the fabric of life, and we numb that reality with entertainment that stomps any intelligence out of our minds. This book is painful to read, but I believe that we need to hurt quite deeply before we start to wake up and honour this jewelled Earth that sustains us. The alternatives are horrific and we are spreading them like the cancers that infest our bodies. Fortunately, Williams infuses the horror of our collective self-abuse with exquisite moments of reflection amongst other life forms that live in harmony; she herself obviously lives this way, and may she be blessed for being a catalyst of hope and right action.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful, intimate, important storytelling
Review: An intimate telling of family and loss, courage and humor, honest confrontations with mortality, a deeply spiritual tone, and chapter titles introducing us to over thirty different birds, this beautifully descriptive and authentic tale leaves us with tears and a search for binoculars and a bird guidebook. Terry Tempest Williams weaves with great detail the heart breaking and life affirming events of the simultaneous devastation of her mother's body and the migratory bird sanctuary that has been her refuge. She skillfully keeps from dramatizing this innately powerful story. Williams had me deeply attached to pages I knew would be increasingly painful to read. Yet, as it became more painful, I would never describe it as depressing. I am struck by the powerful way she honors her mother, their family's reverent yet human journey through a particularly virulent cancer, and the ultimate power of nature, and equally important, humanity's thoughtless interference with nature, to turn one's life into a personal desert that used to be called home. She is a master storyteller and a poweful activist. This must read challenges the reader to enter a world where solutions are not simple, and life is exposed at its most vulnerable while courage and passion abound.
Rating:
Summary: A powerful, moving masterpiece
Review: As a professional ecologist, I came to Terry Tempest William's "Refuge" expecting yet another book about birding. Was I ever surprised! "Refuge" is an intimate tapestry of sickness, grief, and healing in both the "natural" and "human" worlds. Her love of a special place (the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge on the Great Salt Lake just west of Brigham City, Utah) is palpable and deeply spiritual. Terry's depiction of her family's trials is simultaneously wrenching and uplifting."Refuge" helped pull my grandmother out of a profound depression after the death of my grandfather, her companion of 55 years; and has carried another friend through her own mother's cancer. "Refuge" has helped me understand my own passion for places and all things natural...I feel compelled to note that all of this praise comes from a card-carrying (boot-wearing) American male. "Refuge" is a story for everyone. I've personally given away more than a dozen copies. I can't recommend it enough.
Rating:
Summary: A refuge becomes a sanctuary
Review: As the Great Salt Lake rose to submerge and destroy the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, grief rose and submerged Terry Tempest William's spirit with the destruction of her mother and grandmother by cancer. The gradual regeneration of the Refuge with the subsiding of the lake parallels the regeneration of her spirit and the subsiding of her grief. But the pain and the scars remain and transform. Terry is no longer an accepting trusting Mormon daughter but a searching questioning activist after her tumultuous emotional experience. One wonders if the gifts of awareness and sensitivity are worth the price of the pain endured. The Refuge becomes a sanctuary for the returning birds and Terry's returning spirit. No more moving piece has been written about the folly and ultimate tragedy of human intervention in the environment. From the nuclear testing of the 1950s to the manipulation of the level of the Great Salt Lake, there is much to learn about the long term consquences of our short sighted acts. Everyone should read and reread and pass on this book.
Rating:
Summary: One of the most beautiful books I've ever read
Review: From the refuge of pain and loss in her Great Salt Lake desert world, Terry Tempest Williams weaves a beautiful and lyrical journal from the intricate fabric of landscape. A landscape that is both ravished by natural and perhaps man made destruction. The history of this land is the history of Williams' family and she serves the reader well as journalist, historian and naturalist. In the spring of 1983 a significant rise in the Great Salt Lake began to flood her beloved Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and at the same time cancer cells began to flood her mother's body. As owls, avocets and egrets struggle to survive the rising waters, Williams' mother struggles to find peace and comfort in dying. Where mother nature is damaged, mother Tempest is too. Williams has a truly poetic ability to tie the spirit of land and of family into one beautiful image. "I am reminded that what I adore, admire and draw from Mother is inherent in the Earth. My mother's spirit can be recalled simply by placing my hands on the black humus of mountains or the lean sands of desert. Her love, warmth, and her breath, even her arms around me-are the waves, the wind, sunlight, and water.", she writes. In the process of dealing with so much pain and loss Williams shifts from a casual observer of life's folly to passionate activist. Ultimately she puts the pieces of puzzle together to see a picture of generations of cancer certainly tied to exposure to the on-going nuclear testing by the American government in the Utah desert. William's chilling awakening to the manipulation of the environment by man in the name of progress should serve as our own wake-up call to the capacity of destruction that we have tolerated. Landscape becomes refuge and offers hope of healing. Williams writes, "It's strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. " This book is a wonderful testament to life and to the power and capacity for regeneration and healing. The book also provides very poignant and heartfelt lessons on embracing our dying and our loss and celebrating life in every moment.
Rating:
Summary: Brave and Poetic
Review: From the refuge of pain and loss in her Great Salt Lake desert world, Terry Tempest Williams weaves a beautiful and lyrical journal from the intricate fabric of landscape. A landscape that is both ravished by natural and perhaps man made destruction. The history of this land is the history of Williams' family and she serves the reader well as journalist, historian and naturalist. In the spring of 1983 a significant rise in the Great Salt Lake began to flood her beloved Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and at the same time cancer cells began to flood her mother's body. As owls, avocets and egrets struggle to survive the rising waters, Williams' mother struggles to find peace and comfort in dying. Where mother nature is damaged, mother Tempest is too. Williams has a truly poetic ability to tie the spirit of land and of family into one beautiful image. "I am reminded that what I adore, admire and draw from Mother is inherent in the Earth. My mother's spirit can be recalled simply by placing my hands on the black humus of mountains or the lean sands of desert. Her love, warmth, and her breath, even her arms around me-are the waves, the wind, sunlight, and water.", she writes. In the process of dealing with so much pain and loss Williams shifts from a casual observer of life's folly to passionate activist. Ultimately she puts the pieces of puzzle together to see a picture of generations of cancer certainly tied to exposure to the on-going nuclear testing by the American government in the Utah desert. William's chilling awakening to the manipulation of the environment by man in the name of progress should serve as our own wake-up call to the capacity of destruction that we have tolerated. Landscape becomes refuge and offers hope of healing. Williams writes, "It's strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. " This book is a wonderful testament to life and to the power and capacity for regeneration and healing. The book also provides very poignant and heartfelt lessons on embracing our dying and our loss and celebrating life in every moment.
Rating: 
Summary: admirable
Review: I give Ms. Williams points for her honesty. The book is at times insightful. Her relationship to the environment is admirable and her use of the Great Salt Lake as metaphor is quite poetic. Ms. William's ideas on solitude and our place in the landscape are something that I can relate to and appreciate. I too lost my mother to breast cancer in Utah. There is much about Ms. Williams that I admire. I believe that this was her first book and it is often pretentious which is excusable in a first work. She over uses simile, as new writers often do, which only trivializes the piece. It is often disjointed which I am certain is how life felt to Ms. Williams as she lived through these simultaneous life changing events. I recommend it as a loving tribute to Ms Williams's mother and the Utah landscape and as an honest portrayal of her personal growth in relationship.
Rating:
Summary: Growing up in Southern Idaho/Northern Utah
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Stark, wrenching, uplifting...
Review: I had the excellent fortune to be 'required' to buy and read this book for a university literature course nearly a year ago. Williams' simple, elegant prose gripped me fully for more than 80% of the book -- providing me with two sleepless nights during which I could not find it within my will power to leave the book until the next day. The intensity of several scenes were so formidable as to leave me, literally, trembling with emotion. The book provoked feelings which remain close to my heart still. Every student in my class of 30 felt unanimous in their high praise and, after a week's discussion, we were rather disappointed at the necessity of moving on to the next topic. It is one of those precious finds that would require a good deal of time to fully probe and reflect upon on the depth of its heart-felt narrative. Its symbolism, levels of meaning and complexity are well laid in a simple prose that is easily accessible. As for myself, I immediately sent a copy to my mother for Mother's Day, after which she related the same powerful feelings about the story and determined to send a copy to her own mother. Please, take the time to experience this book -- you will not regret the time well spent.
Rating:
Summary: Deep connections between family, the landscape and death.
Review: I had the pleasure of attening an Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1999 at which Terry Tempest Williams spoke. Her understanding of the connection of the human species and the earth on which we live was particularly moving. Her comment on the events of this week, the national sorrow amidst the shootings in Colorado were timely and poignant. I live only a few miles from the Bear River Refuge. This living, breathing landscape is truly as stark, beautiful and peaceful as Williams describes. The lessons of this refuge...the ability of our broken planet to carry on with life and nuturing and sustinance...and to recognize that our connection to this earth is undeniable will someday make events of this week unimaginable.
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