Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
by Terry Tempest Williams, Pantheon, 230 pages
Refuge, a Book Review
Retro-review: Here’s a release from 2000. 'Refuge' is a classic must-read for those who are called to love our earth and its inhabitants. For essayists and memorists, 'Refuge' serves as a mentor text for how an essay collection can pull together threads in life to form an intimate narrative with a scope big enough for the whole world.
In the life of Terry Tempest Williams, her refuge is her creation. She builds not with concrete, steel, or wood. Williams builds by experiencing the natural world as her guide to understanding the wisdom inherent in the spirituality of the earth. She builds a way to live on the planet with a measure of personal peace.
'Refuge, Book Review' continues below the video.
Dishonor and Disaster
Williams' struggles in the unnatural world accumulate as the women in her family, all down winders of nuclear fallout, are stricken with cancer; simultaneously the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the Great Salt Lake, the landscapes she loves, are transformed by flooding that the government attempts to control by pumping water into the dessert. Her mother’s chemotherapeutic drugs concurrently pump into a body that clearly cannot overcome the proliferation of cancer. Williams holds and adjusts her lens with personal precision and exposes both the natural and the unnatural.
Effective Narrative
Her words are both direct (“Most of the women in my family are dead. Cancer.”) and ethereal (“On days such as this, when my soul has been wrenched, the simplicity of flight and form above the lake untangles my grief. ‘Glide’ the gulls write in the sky–and, for a few brief moments, I do.”) Throughout Refuge, Williams shakes her activist head at the societal disconnection from the natural world that threatens to destroy the source of life, community, and refuge. Her final metaphor of grief, expressed after her mother’s slow death, is of the Great Salt Lake, a personal reservoir of tears not only for Williams but for all who share her love and lamentations for the land and all stunted and stolen life.
A version of this review first appeared in the Sierra Club's 'Muir View.' If you would like to forward a book for possible review, talk to us via the contact form.
