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Finding Beauty in a Broken World
In her most original, provocative, and eloquently moving book since Refuge , Terry Tempest Williams gives us a luminous chronicle of finding beauty in a broken world. Always an impassioned and far-sighted advocate for a just relationship between the natural world and humankind, Williams has broadened her concerns over the past several years to include a reconfiguration of family and community in her search for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation.
Williams begins in Ravenna, Italy, where “jeweled ceilings became lavish tales” through the art of mosaic. She discovers that mosaic is not just an art form but a form of integration, and when she returns to the American Southwest, her physical and spiritual home, and observes a clan of prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, she apprehends an ecological mosaic created by a remarkable species in the sagebrush steppes of the Colorado Plateau. And, finally, Williams travels to a small village in Rwanda, where, along with fellow artists, she joins survivors of the 1994 genocide and builds a memorial literally from the rubble of war, an act that becomes a spark for social change and healing.
A singular meditation on how the natural and human worlds both collide and connect in violence and beauty, this is a work of uncommon perceptions that dares to find intersections between arrogance and empathy, tumult and peace, constructing a narrative of hopeful acts by taking that which is broken and creating something whole.
Williams begins in Ravenna, Italy, where “jeweled ceilings became lavish tales” through the art of mosaic. She discovers that mosaic is not just an art form but a form of integration, and when she returns to the American Southwest, her physical and spiritual home, and observes a clan of prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, she apprehends an ecological mosaic created by a remarkable species in the sagebrush steppes of the Colorado Plateau. And, finally, Williams travels to a small village in Rwanda, where, along with fellow artists, she joins survivors of the 1994 genocide and builds a memorial literally from the rubble of war, an act that becomes a spark for social change and healing.
A singular meditation on how the natural and human worlds both collide and connect in violence and beauty, this is a work of uncommon perceptions that dares to find intersections between arrogance and empathy, tumult and peace, constructing a narrative of hopeful acts by taking that which is broken and creating something whole.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
167 people are currently reading
2521 people want to read
About the author
Terry Tempest Williams
101 books1,446 followersTerry Tempest Williams is an American author, conservationist and activist. Williams’ writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah in which she was raised. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature.
She has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience in the years 1987 - 1992 in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert, and again, in March, 2003 in Washington, D.C., with Code Pink, against the Iraq War. She has been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of the Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.
Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World was published in 2008 by Pantheon Books.
In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfictionand a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009). In 2011, she received the 18th International Peace Award given by the Community of Christ Church.
Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. She has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she continues to teach. She divides her time between Wilson, Wyoming and Castle Valley, Utah, where her husband Brooke is field coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
She has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience in the years 1987 - 1992 in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert, and again, in March, 2003 in Washington, D.C., with Code Pink, against the Iraq War. She has been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of the Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.
Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World was published in 2008 by Pantheon Books.
In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfictionand a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009). In 2011, she received the 18th International Peace Award given by the Community of Christ Church.
Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. She has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she continues to teach. She divides her time between Wilson, Wyoming and Castle Valley, Utah, where her husband Brooke is field coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 203 reviews
November 3, 2009
I know, I know, most people drop out in the prairie dog section, but if you stick with it that section begins to have a certain rhythm and creates its own subtle narrative structure. You find yourself suddenly caring about the individual prairie dogs as characters, in addition to the obvious goal of making you rethink the prevailing attitude toward them as "varmints."
But seriously, if you get through the prairie dog section, everything has an odd and elegant way of coming together.
But seriously, if you get through the prairie dog section, everything has an odd and elegant way of coming together.
July 25, 2010
Briefly, on form: as prose poetry, this gorgeous work is totally accessible for people who don't consider themselves "poetry reader." It's riveting. You'll want to keep reading.
On content: How can you NOT read a book that yokes together an apprenticeship as a mosaic artist in Ravenna, her grappling with the plight of endangered prairie dogs, which are simultaneously hunted and protected by the U.S., and women in Rwanda? Williams offers a timely, fresh take on global life as an organismic rather than a collection of species existing in parallel. And of course, the form of the work mirrors this interconnectedness.
On content: How can you NOT read a book that yokes together an apprenticeship as a mosaic artist in Ravenna, her grappling with the plight of endangered prairie dogs, which are simultaneously hunted and protected by the U.S., and women in Rwanda? Williams offers a timely, fresh take on global life as an organismic rather than a collection of species existing in parallel. And of course, the form of the work mirrors this interconnectedness.
August 11, 2022
Sooo apparently the idea to present the book "like a mosaic" came to Terry Tempest Williams in a feverish epiphany right before the book was gonna be sent in to get published. Fine. That explains the way that the structure of the story is too..straightforward for my taste. (And too rigidly divided into thematic sections: intro/mosaics, prairie dogs, Rwanda, mosaic-y/choppy conclusion.) I'm of the opinion that such experimental, mosaic-inspired artsy-fartsiness ought to be *more* experimental. Make the pieces smaller, the jumble tighter, the overall effect more of an emergent revelation.
The feverishness kind of makes it okay that she thought "making a mosaic" could involve just un-indenting paragraphs, inserting extra spaces here and there, and interjecting slightly relevant (pretentious) quotes into her narrative. But shouldn't there have been more editing involved after the mosaic motif was decided on?
It seemed slightly more mosaic-like by the end, what with the chapters getting choppier again. (I assumed this was meant to mirror the beginning's choppiness, and make a sort of border for her "mosaic." Which is cool.) The overall form was helped by her including occasional letters and notes and stuff. (I'm biased by the fact that I'm not a fan of TTW's voice. She's very...spiritual. Which, to me, means making embarrassingly sentimental--and obvious--observations. As I read, I felt like I was hearing a breathy guided meditation voice in my head. I couldn't decide whether to flinch or roll my eyes.)
Yes, genocide/senseless death/murder is horrible. Yes, people get too wrapped up in politics and forget to consider the individual people and the idea of shared humanity. And prairie dogs are cute. But the narrative is too busy congratulating itself for noticing all these (obvious) things and sharing a very personal experience (which has made the narrator holier-than-thou) to involve its readers in any meaningful sort of engagement with the topics.
Recommended For people on treadmills
Recommended By Lori Bettison-Varga
The feverishness kind of makes it okay that she thought "making a mosaic" could involve just un-indenting paragraphs, inserting extra spaces here and there, and interjecting slightly relevant (pretentious) quotes into her narrative. But shouldn't there have been more editing involved after the mosaic motif was decided on?
It seemed slightly more mosaic-like by the end, what with the chapters getting choppier again. (I assumed this was meant to mirror the beginning's choppiness, and make a sort of border for her "mosaic." Which is cool.) The overall form was helped by her including occasional letters and notes and stuff. (I'm biased by the fact that I'm not a fan of TTW's voice. She's very...spiritual. Which, to me, means making embarrassingly sentimental--and obvious--observations. As I read, I felt like I was hearing a breathy guided meditation voice in my head. I couldn't decide whether to flinch or roll my eyes.)
Yes, genocide/senseless death/murder is horrible. Yes, people get too wrapped up in politics and forget to consider the individual people and the idea of shared humanity. And prairie dogs are cute. But the narrative is too busy congratulating itself for noticing all these (obvious) things and sharing a very personal experience (which has made the narrator holier-than-thou) to involve its readers in any meaningful sort of engagement with the topics.
Recommended For people on treadmills
Recommended By Lori Bettison-Varga
August 22, 2014
Terry has the rare ability to see her life through series of connected, relatable events. She puts small examples into grand ideas, and makes those pertinent to her readers.
In this, she connects her mosaic studies in Italy with her passionate and thorough study of endangered prairie dogs at Bryce Canyon, and then her humanitarian journey through Rwanda. The portion on prairie dogs is daunting at first--it's truly a transcription of her journal entries--but becomes magical as it weaves each individually named prairie dog into a separate narrative (just be patient).
Her theme here is brokenness, the unavoidability of destruction, but the need to find and define beauty in our own ways, regardless of the things we cannot control.
This is truly a human story at its heart, with the prairie dogs standing in for our own communities, and Rwanda a stark contrast to the peace and privilege we are lucky to experience in our very different nations. Terry is profound and beautiful in her insights.
"Arrogance is arrogance, and cruelty committed to a person or an animal is cruelty." (90)
"The extermination of a species and the extermination of a people are predicated on the same impulses: prejudice, cruelty, arrogance, and ignorance. If we cannot begin to see the world whole in all its connectivity, honoring the sacred nature of life, then I fear we will further fracture and fragment the integrity of our communities, as we continue to cultivate the seedbed of war." (261)
"... The vehicle for joy is Beauty. Beauty is a right--an angelic quality that heals. ... When your environment is beautiful, it gives you dignity. ..." (270)
"What people do is much more important that what people say." (306)
In this, she connects her mosaic studies in Italy with her passionate and thorough study of endangered prairie dogs at Bryce Canyon, and then her humanitarian journey through Rwanda. The portion on prairie dogs is daunting at first--it's truly a transcription of her journal entries--but becomes magical as it weaves each individually named prairie dog into a separate narrative (just be patient).
Her theme here is brokenness, the unavoidability of destruction, but the need to find and define beauty in our own ways, regardless of the things we cannot control.
This is truly a human story at its heart, with the prairie dogs standing in for our own communities, and Rwanda a stark contrast to the peace and privilege we are lucky to experience in our very different nations. Terry is profound and beautiful in her insights.
"Arrogance is arrogance, and cruelty committed to a person or an animal is cruelty." (90)
"The extermination of a species and the extermination of a people are predicated on the same impulses: prejudice, cruelty, arrogance, and ignorance. If we cannot begin to see the world whole in all its connectivity, honoring the sacred nature of life, then I fear we will further fracture and fragment the integrity of our communities, as we continue to cultivate the seedbed of war." (261)
"... The vehicle for joy is Beauty. Beauty is a right--an angelic quality that heals. ... When your environment is beautiful, it gives you dignity. ..." (270)
"What people do is much more important that what people say." (306)
May 25, 2009
There are layers to go through in order to understand humanity. Williams excavates them. A broken world can be put together again in a beautiful way. There are rules to making mosaic. Attend to light, to shape. Find the right piece. Prairie dogs live communally, kiss, and greet the sun. In Rwanda is a layer of hell. How hard to go there. this is a great book. She provides space for the reader to absorb what is written. Great: powerful, mighty, deep, spiritual, truthful. Hard, but not difficult to read.
October 1, 2015
Devastating. It strips the skin from the hide and burns the fat from the brain.
Reading this after reading Arctic Dreams and Strange Piece of Paradise, it's clear how much better a writer Terry Tempest Williams is than most other humans. Already her "Refuge" is on my shortlist of most important books, and now this one joins it on the shelf of books I'd want if I were ever stranded on an island. There is so much wisdom, so much humanity here--and so much devastation and horror. It is a quest to be dignified in a world that only offer indignities.
At first blush, the book seems like four unrelated essays, the first the least interesting thematically: a middle-aged woman from America who goes to Italy, studies art, and discovers spiritual truths. This would be weak sauce--Under a Tuscan Sun; Eat, Pray, Love--if it weren't for the formal and structural experiments Williams was making, and the promises she was making to the reader with those. The story then switches, for the meaty middle, back to Williams's beloved southwest corner of America, where she studies prairie dogs, those much-despised, much-neglected varmints. The section is told much through her field notes. Interwoven is the story of her own family's life on that same land, and the tragic death of her brother, still then only in his forties, from a cancer she obliquely blames on the area's radioactive history. This book is very much a sequel to Refuge, which detailed the death of her mother from cancer.
Another radical rupture, and the book skips to Rwanda, in the years after the horrible genocide that still haunts the country. Williams has reluctantly been recruited to help with a mosaic memorial to the dead as a kind of reconciliation. Without a doubt, this is the hardest section to read. There is a fourth section, a kind of coda, in which Williams and her husband--childless by choice--bring a Rwandan man to America to study--a man, no doubt, who nonetheless considers Williams a maternal figure.
Much to her chagrin: which is all to her credit.
The book skirts a lot of the same pitfalls that trapped López in Arctic Dreams--the cultural tourism, romanticizing nature, the privileged outsider judging the actions of others--but avoids them all. Williams has a sense of humor, though her book deals with subjects of the utmost seriousness: art; engagement with the natural world; human depravities. She has an ironic sense--not arch, but reflexive and humbling, recognizing her own complicity. She understands the absurd--she tells the tale of having diarrhea, after her first visit to Africa, seeing the end of a tapeworm stick out of her, and trying to grab it and pull it out.
The world can be--often is--a very shitty place, in the most literal sense, and she understands that. She understands, too, the limits of understanding human motivation, and dreams--not just by judging others, but in her own self, too, her own misunderstandings of the world, her own difficulties finding refuge in a world that is broken, that offers death as its only sure reward.
She is trying--through her words, through the innovative, fragmentary--mosaical--structure to create bits of hope, to reflect the light. There are sinews here, poetic, themes and tropes developed deeply through repetition, often only subtly mentioned, that make the book a complete whole, the various portions part of one complete picture: an image that tries to show the possibility of dignity that comes only from facing and surviving life's worst.
A tour-de-force.
Reading this after reading Arctic Dreams and Strange Piece of Paradise, it's clear how much better a writer Terry Tempest Williams is than most other humans. Already her "Refuge" is on my shortlist of most important books, and now this one joins it on the shelf of books I'd want if I were ever stranded on an island. There is so much wisdom, so much humanity here--and so much devastation and horror. It is a quest to be dignified in a world that only offer indignities.
At first blush, the book seems like four unrelated essays, the first the least interesting thematically: a middle-aged woman from America who goes to Italy, studies art, and discovers spiritual truths. This would be weak sauce--Under a Tuscan Sun; Eat, Pray, Love--if it weren't for the formal and structural experiments Williams was making, and the promises she was making to the reader with those. The story then switches, for the meaty middle, back to Williams's beloved southwest corner of America, where she studies prairie dogs, those much-despised, much-neglected varmints. The section is told much through her field notes. Interwoven is the story of her own family's life on that same land, and the tragic death of her brother, still then only in his forties, from a cancer she obliquely blames on the area's radioactive history. This book is very much a sequel to Refuge, which detailed the death of her mother from cancer.
Another radical rupture, and the book skips to Rwanda, in the years after the horrible genocide that still haunts the country. Williams has reluctantly been recruited to help with a mosaic memorial to the dead as a kind of reconciliation. Without a doubt, this is the hardest section to read. There is a fourth section, a kind of coda, in which Williams and her husband--childless by choice--bring a Rwandan man to America to study--a man, no doubt, who nonetheless considers Williams a maternal figure.
Much to her chagrin: which is all to her credit.
The book skirts a lot of the same pitfalls that trapped López in Arctic Dreams--the cultural tourism, romanticizing nature, the privileged outsider judging the actions of others--but avoids them all. Williams has a sense of humor, though her book deals with subjects of the utmost seriousness: art; engagement with the natural world; human depravities. She has an ironic sense--not arch, but reflexive and humbling, recognizing her own complicity. She understands the absurd--she tells the tale of having diarrhea, after her first visit to Africa, seeing the end of a tapeworm stick out of her, and trying to grab it and pull it out.
The world can be--often is--a very shitty place, in the most literal sense, and she understands that. She understands, too, the limits of understanding human motivation, and dreams--not just by judging others, but in her own self, too, her own misunderstandings of the world, her own difficulties finding refuge in a world that is broken, that offers death as its only sure reward.
She is trying--through her words, through the innovative, fragmentary--mosaical--structure to create bits of hope, to reflect the light. There are sinews here, poetic, themes and tropes developed deeply through repetition, often only subtly mentioned, that make the book a complete whole, the various portions part of one complete picture: an image that tries to show the possibility of dignity that comes only from facing and surviving life's worst.
A tour-de-force.
December 25, 2012
Terry tempest Williams is my favorite author. The first book of hers that I read was Refuge. I read finding beauty in a Broken world a few years ago but it is the book that I most often go back and select favorite passages and pages to read again. She has the naturalists eye and skill of observation, she has the artist's curiosity and patience to take tiny fragile pieces of glass and create beautiful mosaic, she has the voice and heart of a poet and the compassion of a bodhisattva and the experience of suffering and resilience. All of this is evident in this artful and poignant journey she makes to Italy to study Mosaic, the quiet naturalist studies the endangered and fragile prairie dog, and then she travels to Rwanda to make sense of the genocide. In Terry's world, the prairie dog's demise is connected to the genocide by the human condition of losing compassion. She artfully inspires us to stay open and see the trauma and the beauty of this indeed, very broken world. The mosaic is the perfect broken art to teach us how fragile we are as broken pieces of glass, but how beautiful and strong we are as a mosaic of a world community
July 7, 2018
Mosaics, prairie dogs, Rwandan genocide. The author's attempt to connect them within a 400-plus page book. Ambitious, promising, disappointing.
January 10, 2009
Okay the author's basic premise is that life is like a mosaic. (I love mosaics)....that broken pieces can be put back together to form something new and while different - beautiful in its new way. I'm having a really hard time with this book. So the book is divided into 3 parts - the author studying mosaic with an Italian master. The author studying prarie dogs in the American SW - and Bush's total disregard for the environment -big picture - and how relocation of prarie dogs will eventually lead to the extinction of prarie dogs and other species dependent on prarie dogs. The last part is about genocide in Rwanda. (The author lived in Rwanda).
I heard the author interviewed on NPR and found the premise interesting....I was particularly fascinated with her observation of how prarie dogs "pray". Evidently they come out of their burrows at the same time every day face East with paws together and chirp a distinctive chirp. LSS, I am having a hard time getting through this book. Prarie dogs are numbered and labled....i.e. "R49-3 awoke early and had a poop".....I feel like I'm trudging through a swamp of unnecessary detail. I haven't gotten to the final section on Rwanda yet because I can't get through the numbered prarie dogs. The author is a poet - but her style - for me - well, its arduous. Happy to lend it to someone who may enjoy it.
I heard the author interviewed on NPR and found the premise interesting....I was particularly fascinated with her observation of how prarie dogs "pray". Evidently they come out of their burrows at the same time every day face East with paws together and chirp a distinctive chirp. LSS, I am having a hard time getting through this book. Prarie dogs are numbered and labled....i.e. "R49-3 awoke early and had a poop".....I feel like I'm trudging through a swamp of unnecessary detail. I haven't gotten to the final section on Rwanda yet because I can't get through the numbered prarie dogs. The author is a poet - but her style - for me - well, its arduous. Happy to lend it to someone who may enjoy it.
March 10, 2011
I loved Terry Tempest Williams' writing in Refuge. It was beautiful and clear, and her love of the environment was clear. She returns to environmental issues in "Finding Beauty," writing in her lovely voice about mosaics and the war on prairie dogs and inexplicably, Rwandan genocide. The book is loveliest when she writes that Finding Beauty in a Broken World is really creating beauty out of our brokenness. The book is nearly 400 pages and it doesn't need to be, but it's a compelling read despite that.
August 31, 2009
All living beings, though sometimes broken, are resilient and the harmony of life is very powerful. This masterful book combines the ancient art of making mosaics, with the fragile ecology of prairie dog communities and the war-torn broken communities of Rwanda in a way that gives me hope for the resilience of human and more-than human communities as we strive for a harmonious life.
August 27, 2011
When I got this book for summer reading in June, I didn't know what to think about it. In general I tend to go for fiction, as more elements can be added and it's more exciting. You kind of feel the book's patterns, its foreshadowing.
I get that this book was supposed to be a mosaic itself, but that realization, the "oh, that's cool" didn't keep me interested in the book. In fact, I found the language at times to be sloshy, moving through it slowly and needing breaks to rest my eyes. It's wordy. And why didn't this "TTW", as she called herself, indent the paragraphs as opposed to spaces? It gave me the impression of reading a very, very long newspaper article.
As for the whole mosaic structure, it kind of made the book seem choppy and unfocused rather than "artsy". One minute she's making mosaics in Italy, the next watching prairie dogs from a creaky tower, the next teaching orphan children in Rwanda about Jell-O.
That said, I didn't hate the book. There were times, especially the prairie dog part, that were eye-opening and make you think. She does present valid points on the human condition, points I had to put sticky notes on for my assignment. I'll have a lot to write about, which is always a good thing.
To conclude: if you have a choice, I wouldn't choose this book. It's not as "visceral" and "demanding" as the praise states, at least for me. But if you're forced to read it like I am, it's not the end of the world. Just like TTW can find beauty in a broken world, you too can find enjoyment in a boring book.
I get that this book was supposed to be a mosaic itself, but that realization, the "oh, that's cool" didn't keep me interested in the book. In fact, I found the language at times to be sloshy, moving through it slowly and needing breaks to rest my eyes. It's wordy. And why didn't this "TTW", as she called herself, indent the paragraphs as opposed to spaces? It gave me the impression of reading a very, very long newspaper article.
As for the whole mosaic structure, it kind of made the book seem choppy and unfocused rather than "artsy". One minute she's making mosaics in Italy, the next watching prairie dogs from a creaky tower, the next teaching orphan children in Rwanda about Jell-O.
That said, I didn't hate the book. There were times, especially the prairie dog part, that were eye-opening and make you think. She does present valid points on the human condition, points I had to put sticky notes on for my assignment. I'll have a lot to write about, which is always a good thing.
To conclude: if you have a choice, I wouldn't choose this book. It's not as "visceral" and "demanding" as the praise states, at least for me. But if you're forced to read it like I am, it's not the end of the world. Just like TTW can find beauty in a broken world, you too can find enjoyment in a boring book.
April 20, 2011
I am a huge Terry Tempest Williams fan, but so far this is my least favorite of her books. I can see how she was trying to connect her topics, but they were so far apart that I don't think it went that well. Fortunately I had recently just read "Left to Tell" so I was aware of the Rwandan Holocaust which helped a lot for understanding the second half of the book. But the biologist in me wins, and my favorite part was actually the prairie dog survey logs although I was surprised that she included so much of that in the book.
October 4, 2010
Strange, disjointed book. Did NOT enjoy and think the author could've said the same thing in a well-thought-out, concise essay.
February 8, 2019
There are profound areas of the book, but I did find it a bit difficult to read as it seemed to be written halfway between poetry and literary fiction. This was the first book of hers I'd read, and I like her environmental focus, and the unique creativity she brings.
October 24, 2012
"A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken." So begins Terry Tempest William's heartfelt experiment with form. Three pieces come together to make up the book, placed side by side like the chips of stone that form a mosaic. In the first we travel with Williams to Ravenna in Italy, where she learns the ancient art itself, but from the moment we leave we delve into a world that is undeniably broken. In Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, Williams volunteers as part of a group of scientists studying the Utah prairie dog, a species on the brink of extinction that is met, for the most part, with disdain by farmers, contractors, hunters and even the Park officials themselves, seen as troublesome rodents and vermin to be shot with high-powered rifles so that they are called "pop-guts" from the way they explode. William's long days spent in the company of these inquisitive and communal creatures convey the empathy and compasion so closely associated with her work and relationship to the natural world, turning a commonly-held view up to the light so that it shines in a way that is new.
That light is dim when she travels to Rwanda in the wake of genocide, a harrowing section, a long narrative of being part of a community torn apart and emptied out by racial murder and torture that echoes the thinning communities of prairie dogs. What glimmers there stems from the people remaining, the brave voices seeking to reclaim the dignity of their lives through art and community.
Finding Beauty in a Broken World succeeds in its audacity; the audacity to hope, to sift beauty from the wreckage and give voice to the voiceless. Like any mosaic the individual pieces might seem undistinguished, but together they carry a weight and sheen that rises above our common clamour.
That light is dim when she travels to Rwanda in the wake of genocide, a harrowing section, a long narrative of being part of a community torn apart and emptied out by racial murder and torture that echoes the thinning communities of prairie dogs. What glimmers there stems from the people remaining, the brave voices seeking to reclaim the dignity of their lives through art and community.
Finding Beauty in a Broken World succeeds in its audacity; the audacity to hope, to sift beauty from the wreckage and give voice to the voiceless. Like any mosaic the individual pieces might seem undistinguished, but together they carry a weight and sheen that rises above our common clamour.
August 24, 2012
Ms. Williams deep writings always wind there way into my heart and mind, insisting upon being pondered. This latest of her works is no exception. The reader is slowly pulled into her experiences in Italy learning the ancient art of mosaic, as well as the hot dry discomfort of being installed in a wood tower helping to research prairie dogs in Utah. There is sadness in reading of the brutal and callous behavior of many of the individuals she comes into contact with. But, there are also those she encounters that are enlightened teachers or fellow travelers that shine a light on the future, not just of nature but of mankind.
The last half of the book focuses on the devastating occurrences of the Rwandan genocide and Terry's interaction with survivors in Rwandan villages. As part of a group of humanitarians, she works towards a mission of bringing beauty and hope back to the survivors by helping to create a memorial site for genocide victims bones to be interred.
Highly recommended read to any who does not choose to be ignorant, but wishes to know the world in all its varied facets.
The last half of the book focuses on the devastating occurrences of the Rwandan genocide and Terry's interaction with survivors in Rwandan villages. As part of a group of humanitarians, she works towards a mission of bringing beauty and hope back to the survivors by helping to create a memorial site for genocide victims bones to be interred.
Highly recommended read to any who does not choose to be ignorant, but wishes to know the world in all its varied facets.
February 28, 2025
Byzantine mosaics, prairie dogs and Rwandan genocide. It wasn't the prose that kept me reading this book; it's pretty choppy and repetitive. But the message is one that has stuck with me. The author, I gather, is a very unorthodox Mormon who starts her journey at a mosaic workshop in Ravenna, Italy, home to the most unbelievable Byzantine mosaics in various churches, chapels, and tombs throughout this rather small city (I visited in 2005 and was awestruck by the mosaics). After that first rather brief section are two larger parts that are basically her journal entries and musings, first while assisting a conservationist in recording the daily patterns of threatened prairie dogs in Utah, then later her experiences working on a memorial (a mosaic) in Rwanda, placed to honor the lives lost in the genocide of 1994.
The metaphor of the mosaic - taking broken shards, picking them up, polishing them, creating a new wholeness out of them and letting the light shine on the beauty created - that's what stayed with me after reading this unusual book. This is a broken world. We can't move on until we pick up the shards of the past and make something new out of them.
The metaphor of the mosaic - taking broken shards, picking them up, polishing them, creating a new wholeness out of them and letting the light shine on the beauty created - that's what stayed with me after reading this unusual book. This is a broken world. We can't move on until we pick up the shards of the past and make something new out of them.
February 6, 2011
Mosaic, very moving how she twines several worlds into one tapestry. Signed by Terry, given to me by my brother. Cried often and learned lots! pg 23 "If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate." pg 25 Henry Bugbee "the tenets of Scripture are meant to be occasions for wonder, not the termination of it."
January 29, 2009
Having read many of TTWilliams books before and loved them I was disappointed in this book. It is just brief paragraphs of information that I could never tie together and didn't hold my attention. Her focus has stayed the same - our earth and value but I couldn't hold prairie dogs, mosaics and our ever expanding population and the effect on the earth together to hold my interest. Oh well.
March 29, 2009
I learned that Prairie dogs can be seen by some with imagination and love as Prayer Dogs and that recovery from genocide is a long and painful process in Rwanda. I felt beauty and intensity while reading this book and have admired this author for a very long time, having many times visited her home state of Utah.
December 19, 2009
This is my Dec. book group read. Many people love Terry Tempest Williams....me not so much. Her style doesn't work for me: snippets, paragraphs lined up one after another page after page and not really tied together in any kind of a flow.
June 15, 2020
Only Terry Tempest Williams could take an idea, create a book with a section taking place in mosaic studios in Italy, a section at Bryce Canyon working on a prairie dog research project, and a section in Rwanda working on a memorial following the genocide -- and do it so beautifully and in a way that is just profoundly moving. In the first section, she explores the ideas and art of mosaics - the concept that you take broken pieces and combine them to form something beautiful as well as the concept of the importance of light and how that influences what you see or notice in a piece of mosaic art. In the section on prairie dogs, she explores the idea of community, the power of observation, and the question of what is truly important and what happens when we label something as "other". In the final section, she is working with a group in Rwanda following the genocide. This section was particularly difficult for me emotionally as she talked with survivors whose stories are brutal. So many people killed in such a short period of time - and afterwards - how do you find a way forward from that? Williams writing is exquisite and her ability to make the reader pause and breathe in the moments she is writing about stands out. There was so much in this book that my heart needed to hear.
August 4, 2024
From an apprentice with mosaicists in Ravenna, Italy, to fieldwork studying prairie dogs in Bryce Canyon, to participating in a memorial to the Rwandan genocide in a rural town, Tempest Williams follows interlocking fragments of our damaged, tearing and tender world. Interspersing her often journalistic research and interviews, with self-critical questions, poignant epiphanies about working through pain, ecological turmoil, tenderness and love, this story feels both diary and expose of the dark spaces we hope to avoid, and the love and yearning for repair which is present even in those most painful aching places.
May 20, 2021
Prairie dogs and the 1994 Rwandan genocide and using mosaics to bring broken things back together again. I thought the structure of the book was really neat and I appreciated the interconnectedness of text and form. Definitely skimmed quite a bit in the prairie dog section. Had to skip some of the narrative in the genocide history, too, simply because it was too hard to read. As always, TTW has a way of taking subjects that seem unrelated and weaving them together and asking questions that make you think about your place in your community and in the larger world.
January 2, 2022
The sections of this memoir felt a little disjointed to me, but overall I love Williams’s writing and reflections on the inter-connectedness of all humans (and prairie dogs).
September 6, 2023
Such a unique writing style; almost more of a journal. Fascinating connections between mosaics the genocide in Rwanda and prairie dogs. I actually loved the tracking of prairie dogs part. But loved the entire story because of the hope we can find… within the world’s struggles and pain and ruin.
August 11, 2023
Definitely a different focus than her other books. A really interesting but extremely sad read
October 23, 2012
Finding Beauty in a Broken World provides a wonderful snapshot of the best and worst of life on Earth. Like many of her books, Williams weaves the chapters of her book together with a common thread. In this case the book begins and ends with an analogy comparing the study of mosaic to an understanding of our fragile human and natural world. Williams builds her case using a series of stories from around the world including her experiences in Italy, Africa, and southern Utah.[return][return]Although I enjoyed her overall approach, Williams is most at home when sharing her love of the natural world in southern Utah. I would have been happy if the book had simply focused on her experiences with the prairie dogs in Bryce Canyon. It reminded me of watching episodes of Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet. I wanted to keep reading about the prairie dog clans and her experiences as a volunteer. Her studies made me want to learn more about the hummingbirds that live in the Pinion Pines and Utah Juniper outside my kitchen window.[return][return]I can tell Terry Tempest Williams enjoys traveling the world, but I encourage her to focus on the needs and issues that impact the American southwest. Living in southern Utah myself, I feel connected to her descriptions and experiences. [return][return]Although I enjoyed this book, I'm hoping that future works will revisit the place-based approach I loved in Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert. I'd love a book that provides insights into the wide range of endangered plants and animals of our area. Prairie dogs are just the beginning.[return][return]Favorite Quotes[return]"We have forgotten the virtue of sitting, watching, observing. Nothing much happens. This is the way of nature. We breathe together. Simply this. For long periods of time, the meadow is still. We watch. We wait. We wonder. Our eyes find a resting place. And then, the slightest of breezes moves the grass. It can be heard as a whispered prayer." (p. 196)[return][return]"Much of our world now is a fabrication, a fiction, a manufactured and manipulated time-lapsed piece of filmmaking where a rose no longer unfolds but bursts. Speed is the buzz, the blur, the drug. Life out of focus becomes our way of seeing. We no longer expect clarity. The lenses of perception and perspective have been replaced by speed, motion. We don't know how to stop. The information we value is retrieved, never internalized." (p. 196)[return][return]"There are long skeins of time when I feel so confused and lost in this broken world of our own making. I don't know who we have become or what to believe or whom to trust. In the presence of prairie dogs, I feel calm, safe, and reassured, sensing there is something more enduring than our own minds. I feel a peace that holds my heart, not because I believe this is better than the world we have created. I feel at peace because the memory of wild nature is held within the nucleus of each living cell. Our bodies remember wholeness in the midst of fragmentation." (p. 198)[return][return]"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." (p. 205)
May 15, 2016
The author uses mosaics as an extended metaphor because of the way the art-form brings broken pieces together to create a beautiful and harmonious whole. As a skilled mosaicist tells Williams:
"Part of the nature of man is to recompose a unity that has been broken. In mosaic, I re-create an order out of shards."
The book uses an experimental style: the text is broken into short bits with space between, like the broken tessera used to create a mosaic. The first 50-ish pages are on the history and creation of mosaics, giving the reader a really good sense of why the metaphor is going to work. Thereafter, the first half of the remaining pages are devoted to prairie dogs, including a long section of scientific observation of a prairie dog colony. The second half is about the author's trip to Rwanda as part of a team working with a genocide-survivor community to create a memorial to those lost in the tragedy. The memorial includes, of course, many mosaics.
First, for my taste the metaphor was extremely heavy-handed. The extreme separateness of the books three parts, the chunking of text into short bits, and the inserted-after-the-fact feel of the references to mosaic creation in the prairie dog section especially, felt more overdone than illuminating. One example is the page where a prairie dog outline is created by the placement of words around the edges - the words being the animals and plants that the prairie dog helps to sustain.
Second, I was uncomfortable with the way the book sometimes equates humans and animals. While I strongly believe in the preservation of the environment, both animals and plants, and think that much of what has been and continues to be done to destroy prairie dogs and their habitat is awful, I cannot put it on the same level as the Rwandan genocide as Williams sometimes does. It reminded me of the way some animal rights activists compare factory farming to slavery or lynching. Is factory farming horrific? Yes. Is it equivalent to human slavery or genocide? Absolutely not.
The final section of the book, where Williams listens to the stories of the genocide survivors in Rwanda, and helps them create a memorial worthy of those they lost, was very interesting. It was fascinating to consider the difficulty of balancing punishment and forgiveness for the perpetrator culture, in a society where so many were killed so brutally and where hatred between cultures still survives. Williams' translator (who becomes like a son to her) says:
"Rwanda is struggling with peace one person at a time. This is as hard as growing wheat on rock. We are finding our way toward unity and reconciliation on a walkway full of thorns, and we are walking barefoot."
Ultimately, though I'm not sure Williams accomplishes her goal with this book, the goal itself is clearly stated: "Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find."
Themes: environmentalism, nature, Utah, Rwanda, mosaic, art, humanism, animal rights, pacifism, memoir, experimental
"Part of the nature of man is to recompose a unity that has been broken. In mosaic, I re-create an order out of shards."
The book uses an experimental style: the text is broken into short bits with space between, like the broken tessera used to create a mosaic. The first 50-ish pages are on the history and creation of mosaics, giving the reader a really good sense of why the metaphor is going to work. Thereafter, the first half of the remaining pages are devoted to prairie dogs, including a long section of scientific observation of a prairie dog colony. The second half is about the author's trip to Rwanda as part of a team working with a genocide-survivor community to create a memorial to those lost in the tragedy. The memorial includes, of course, many mosaics.
First, for my taste the metaphor was extremely heavy-handed. The extreme separateness of the books three parts, the chunking of text into short bits, and the inserted-after-the-fact feel of the references to mosaic creation in the prairie dog section especially, felt more overdone than illuminating. One example is the page where a prairie dog outline is created by the placement of words around the edges - the words being the animals and plants that the prairie dog helps to sustain.
Second, I was uncomfortable with the way the book sometimes equates humans and animals. While I strongly believe in the preservation of the environment, both animals and plants, and think that much of what has been and continues to be done to destroy prairie dogs and their habitat is awful, I cannot put it on the same level as the Rwandan genocide as Williams sometimes does. It reminded me of the way some animal rights activists compare factory farming to slavery or lynching. Is factory farming horrific? Yes. Is it equivalent to human slavery or genocide? Absolutely not.
The final section of the book, where Williams listens to the stories of the genocide survivors in Rwanda, and helps them create a memorial worthy of those they lost, was very interesting. It was fascinating to consider the difficulty of balancing punishment and forgiveness for the perpetrator culture, in a society where so many were killed so brutally and where hatred between cultures still survives. Williams' translator (who becomes like a son to her) says:
"Rwanda is struggling with peace one person at a time. This is as hard as growing wheat on rock. We are finding our way toward unity and reconciliation on a walkway full of thorns, and we are walking barefoot."
Ultimately, though I'm not sure Williams accomplishes her goal with this book, the goal itself is clearly stated: "Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find."
Themes: environmentalism, nature, Utah, Rwanda, mosaic, art, humanism, animal rights, pacifism, memoir, experimental
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