[.ca] Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (ISBN 0679740244)

From Amazon.com:
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.

Moving ad motivational:
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.

Loved this & sent numerous to others with cancer families:
When asked for a suggestion of a Utah author, a bookstore owner gave me my first copy of Refuge. I enjoyed the prose, giving each chapter space to be digested in my mind for an evening or so. As a wildlife artist, I adored Williams' discriptions of the birds she followed through the Salt Lake's rise and fall. Her marvelous relationship with her mother and other family members particularly touched me as my own mother goes through cancer. I got a chuckle out of another review from a male from Utah who did not care for the book. As a recent transplant to Utah, I have been continuously amazed at how egotistical male members of LDS seem to be...reading his review confirmed this thought. I have given numerous copies of this book to many mothers and daughters who are going though various forms of cancer or have a love of nature. Probably best not to give it to any Mormon males, however.

I tried to like this book, but just couldn't -and here's why:
Living in Utah, having a Master's Degree in Aquatic Ecology from BYU, being a physician, and LDS, I get given a copy of this book every year or so from someone who admires this book. Having read this book several times (There are well-written and interesting parts), I usually then ask them what they think about some aspect of the book like the anti-male stance of the author. Most people look puzzled and then admit they have never really read the book, they just heard from someone else that it was really good. Since this book deals with Utah, aquatic ecology, medicine, and Mormonism and most of the reviewers of this book gloss over the nuts and bolts of this book, I thought I would share my impressions of this book since I have some expertise in all these areas. First of all, it really isn't that interesting. It took me several aborted attempts before I actually finished the thing and I love reading. Yes, portions of it are good prose, but I would usually finish 10 pages or so and be unable to say what exactly it was that I had just read. The writing reminds me of Annie Dillard - confusing and over-rated in general. There are other writers who have joined personal and family travails with nature much better. Read Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It" after reading "Refuge" and you will see that there is really no comparison; Maclean is so obviously superior that you wonder why anyone ever told you "Refuge" was that good. Williams attempts to tie together her mother's and grandmother's breast cancer possibly caused by radiation exposure to 1950's nuclear tests to the flooding of a bird refuge in the 1980's. She really doesn't do this that well and this lack of similarity makes the whole book choppy at best and disjointed and irrelevant at worst. Throwing in a little tiresome male-bashing, church-bashing, and anyone-that-doesn't-think-like-me-bashing really grates on the reader after a while and you finish the book feeling like you need to take a long shower to remove the grime from your mind. That said, the strength of this book is the account of how the female family members cope with breast cancer that runs through the generations. This is also the weakness of the book because the author has such a glaring lack of insight of the male members of the family and their feelings. Yes, Ms. Williams, men have feelings too! The last portions of this book are laughable with some mystical feminist eco-worshippers sneaking onto some government test range. Apparently because these women chant and sway and have uteri, there is some mystical significance to this act of pointless civil disobedience. Well anyway, I don't recommend reading this book for anything other than the accounts of breast cancer coping. The anti-Utah, anti-Male, anti-Mormon aspects, and the real lack of anything meaningful regarding ecology makes this book not worth the effort, in my opinion.

read Edward Abbey instead:
This book is overrated and self-indulgent. If you do read it, don't feel compelled to like it just because you've heard so many good things about it.

admirable:
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.