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Finding Beauty in a Broken World. By Terry Tempest Williams. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. Pp. 409. $26.00.
Sometimes the best indicator of a book's significance is how the rest of the world looks and feels after the last page is turned. By the end of Terry Tempest Williams's Finding Beauty in a Broken World, much of my normal daily intake of media and pop culture seemed unsatisfying, unacceptable - even unholy. Indeed, Williams has a way of challenging both personal and cultural worldviews in a way that often leaves the reader unmoored.
Those familiar with Williams's other works - including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place and Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert - know to expert sincere spiritual inquiry in pursuit of both individual and societal transformation. Williams is a seeker, and an activist - a combination of roles that does not coexist easily in the body politic, but one that works well as the source of Williams's unique creative tensions.
Finding Beauty in a Broken World begins with Williams walking the Maine coast after 9/11, asking the ocean for "one wild word" to help her begin to rebuild. In a spiritual exchange that would have fascinated Wallace Stevens, "the sea rolled back" the word mosaic (p. 2). The book then explicates its title in three distinct vignettes: first through Williams's tutelage in the ancient art of mosaic in Ravenna, Italy; next through field research on endangered Utah prairie dogs at Bryce Canyon National Park; and finally as part of the Barefoot Artists' genocide memorial project in Rugerero, Rwanda.
In Ravenna, one of Williams's mosaic instructors states that "part of the nature of man is to recompose a unity that has been broken" (p. 23). This becomes the imperative of Williams's project: to seek and sustain beauty in the chaos and ugliness of the post 9/11 world. As the book's master metaphor, mosaic is both poignant and problematic. Williams desires that readers see the communal nature of an art form most Americans associate with design embellishment in ancient Rome, but through her own...