Terry 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.
Gorgeous photographs taken in National Parks and other wild lands in the southwestern U.S. combine with New Age vignettes.
I loved the photos, but found the narrative didn't appeal to me. One vignette stood out as disturbing: the narrator makes the mistake of telling a local that a mountain lion just ran across the road in front of the truck, and the local's response is to say he and his buddies will be out there the next day with dogs and guns. I found it sad to think that in the modern day people still have no better solution for living with predators than to exterminate them. Other than that -- I found the narrative generally sentimental and information-free, but it's just not my kind of thing and I'm sure it will appeal to others.
An audio tape of sections of this book, plus Pieces of White Shell is available at the Blanding library. The author uses nature and the environment as a sounding board for personal reflection and insights, something most of us are too busy to do. It was the perfect book to listen to, while we traversed the reservation. But like rich chocolate, you can quickly get an overload. For this book of philosophy and insight one needs time to ponder and process.
Some beautiful pictures and some that didn't impress. After finishing Desert Solitaire, I was in the mood for more, but the stories in this book just didn't connect with me. I think the author was striving more for poetry than an engaging story. I'm not a big fan of poetry.
I have read many of Terry's books. Photographs of Zion NP, Escalante National Monument, and elsewhere in Utah interwoven with Terry's beautiful poetic prose transports the reader to an other consciousness.