Finding beauty in a broken world

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Ecologist and writer Williams composes gracefully structured inquiries lush with unexpected and revelatory correspondences. In her most far-reaching and profoundly clarifying work to date, Williams considers the complex beauty of brokenness and the redemptive art of creating wholeness from fragments in a triptych of explorations. She begins in a mosaics workshop in Ravenna, Italy, and then brings the understanding gleaned from working with tesserae to her day-by-day observations of a beleaguered Utah prairie dog town. Williams marvels over this tunnel-building, highly communicative species and dubs them prayer dogs for their habit of standing and watching the sunset. Prairie dogs are crucial to the biodiversity of the grassland ecosystem, a living mosaic, yet they have been brutally massacred and driven to the brink of extinction. The story of her brother's death entwines with Williams' riveting account of her trip to Rwanda with visionary artist Lily Yeh to help create a genocide memorial. Brokenhearted in this land of bones and sorrow, Williams gathers shattering stories of death and resilience with the help of an extraordinary survivor who becomes her son, bearing witness to the horror of neighbors slaughtering neighbors in an attempted annihilation. Scientific in her exactitude, compassionate in her receptivity, and rhapsodic in expression, Williams has constructed a beautiful mosaic of loss and renewal that affirms, with striking lucidity, the need for reverence for all of life.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Williams (The Open Space of Democracy) travels to Ravenna, Italy, a town famous for its ancient mosaics, to "learn a new language with my hands." Back home in Utah, Williams views the lives of a clan of endangered prairie dogs--a species essential to the ecological mosaic of the grasslands and the creators of "the most sophisticated animal language decoded so far"--through the rules of Italian mosaics. After intimate study of a prairie dog town at Bryce Canyon, her visit to 19th-century prairie dog specimens at the American Museum of Natural History segues, dreamlike, to a glass case of bones from the genocide in Rwanda, where Williams, overwhelmed by the death of her brother but knowing that her "own spiritual evolution depended upon it," travels with artist Lily Yeh, who "understands mosaic as taking that which is broken and creating something whole," to build a memorial with genocide survivors. The book, itself a skillful, nuanced mosaic ("a conversation between what is broken... a conversation with light, with color, with form") uses this "way of thinking about the world" to convincingly "make the connection between racism and specism" and sensitively argues for respect for life in all its myriad forms. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Williams continues her spiritual explorations. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Environmental advocate and nature writer Williams (Environmental Humanities/Univ. of Utah; The Open Space of Democracy, 2004, etc.) celebrates the "beauty of being brought together." Tesserae, the cut stone and glass and enamel used in making mosaics, usher in her leitmotif: that it is elemental to human nature and a measure of our compassion to recompose a unity that has been shattered. "I believe in the beauty of all things broken," she writes, and mosaics provide a clear-cut example as she describes her apprenticeship in a mosaic workshop in Ravenna, Italy, where she found that "a spiritual history of evolving pagan and Christian perspectives can be read in a dazzling narrative of cut stones and glass." Her other two instances of something broken are more oblique: the threatened prairie dog and violence in Rwanda. Prairie dogs are not charismatic animals like whales or wolves, especially not to golf-course managers and housing developers, and thus they test the range of human awareness and our remove from the basic rights of existence and commonwealth. Observing a prairie-dog clan, she immersed herself in their community. Her sentences are short, staccato, often incantatory, and arranged just so on the page (a mosaic of words). Williams stumbles a bit when trying to apply to humans her contention that "there is a perfection in imperfection," as she witnessed in mosaics. It certainly doesn't apply to those who committed genocide in Rwanda, where the author ventured as a scribe for a team building a memorial to the victims. Knitting together the Hutus and Tutsis will take a long time, she acknowledges, but she now shares beauty and community with her adopted Rwandan son. A deep-running meditation on reaching for the sublime despite obstacles. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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We watched the towers collapse. We watched America choose war. The peace in our own hearts shattered. How to pick up the pieces? What to do with these pieces? I was desperate to retrieve the poetry I had lost. Standing on a rocky point in Maine, looking east toward the horizon at dusk, I faced the ocean. " Give me one wild word. " It was all I asked of the sea. The tide was out. The mudflats exposed. A gull picked up a large white clam, hovered high above the rocks, then dropped it. The clam broke open, and the gull swooped down to eat the fleshy animal inside. "Give me one wild word to follow . . . " And the word the sea rolled back to me was "m o s a i c." Ravenna is the town in Italy where the west arm of Rome and the east arm of Constantinople clasped hands and agreed on a new capital of the Roman Empire in 402 AD. It was a pragmatic decision made by a shift in power, the decline of Rome and the rise of Byzantium. A spiritual history of evolving pagan and Christian perspectives can be read in a dazzling narrative of cut stones and glass. Eloquence is spoken through the labor of hands, anonymous hands of forgotten centuries. With eyes looking up, artisans rolled gold tesserae between their fingers in thought, as they searched for the precise placement in domes and apses where light could converse with glass. Jeweled ceilings become lavish tales. I want to understand these stories told through fragments. I am an apprentice in a mosaic workshop. Her name is Luciana. She is my teacher. Her work is unsigned, anonymous. Like the mosaicists before her who created the ancient mosaics that adorn the sacred interiors of this quiet town, she conducts the workshop in the traditional manner outlined centuries ago. The tools required: a hammer and a hardie. The hardie is similar to a chisel and is embedded in a tree stump for stability. A piece of marble, glass, or stone, desiring to be cut, is held between the forefinger and thumb of the left hand, placed perpendicular on the hardie. The hammer that bears two cutting edges, gracefully curved, is raised in the right hand. With a quick blow, a tessera is born, the essential cube in the crea- tion of a mosaic. Her name is Luciana. She is a mosaicist in the town of Ravenna. She has no belief in invention or innovation. "It has all been done before," she says. "There are rules." 1.The play of light is the first rule of mosaic. 2.The surface of mosaics is irregular, even angled, to increase the dance of light on the tesserae. 3.Tesserae are irregular, rough, individualized, unique. 4.If you are creating horizontal line, place tesserae vertically. 5.If you are creating a vertical line, place tesserae horizontally. 6. The line in mosaic is supreme; the flow of the line is what matters so the eye is never disturbed or interrupted. 7.The background is very important in emphasizing the mosaic pattern. There must always be at least one line of tesserae that outlines the pattern. Sometimes there will be as many as three lines defining the pattern as part of the background. 8.There is a perfection in imperfection. The interstices or gaps between the tesserae speak their own language in mosaics. 9.Many colors are used to create one color from afar. Different hues of the same color were always used in ancient mosaics. 10.The distance from which the mosaic is viewed is important to the design, color, and execution of the mosaic. 11.The play of light is the first and last rule of mosaic. Luciana will tell you once that you learn the rules of ancient mosaics, only then can you break them. She places a gold piece of glass between her finger and thumb on the hardie and h Excerpted from Finding Beauty in a Broken World by Terry Tempest Williams All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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