Finding Beauty in a Broken World

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 th

This is a beautifully written, heart-felt and complex book. TTW moves flawlessly from surface topic to the deepest parts of what this book is really about. She is a master at weaving a whole story and creating an extremely vivid and accurate picture of times, events and place. I found this to be a haunting narrative and learned more about Genocide than I ever thought I could or thought I wanted to. She is amazing.

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.

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.

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.