Finding Beauty in a Broken World

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.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.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.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.Favorite Quotes"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)"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 The lenses of perception and perspective have been replaced by speed, motion.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)"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)"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)

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)

As some other reviewers have noted, this book is disjointed. The essentially three different stories told (mosaics, prairie dogs, Rwanda) are perhaps thematically connected in Terry's head, but this is not brought together very well on the paper. I could see where she was going with it, but the book ends very suddenly with no real attempt to tie together the three themes.Individually, the two main stories (the initial mosaic story is little more than an introduction) are interesting, and, perhaps because I am a biologist myself, I found the prairie dog story very interesting. They just don't work as a combination.Also quite jarring is that like in most of Terry's books, she is very sloppy with bird names, which is surprising for someone who is working so closely with nature, and who actually takes pains to name birds to species level in her books. But did she really see a ruby-throated hummingbird in Bryce, or was that a broad-tailed (which also has a ruby throat), given that the former is extremely rare in Utah and the other is ubiquitous? She misspells "trogon" for "trogan", and not in the wildest imagination can the call of a wagtail be called a "song" (I believe she calls it soothing or something as well). Either these birds are misidentified, or her field notes are just confused. Either way, it doesn't speak well for someone talking so much about the environment and wild animals and location to make these mistakes. That, together with the lack of cohesion in this book, lowers my opinion of it.