'Finding Beauty in a Broken World' by Terry Tempest Williams

in a Broken World

Terry Tempest Williams

Pantheon: 420 pp., $26

Terry Tempest Williams is full to the brim. When she was younger, she wrote books about her life with and separation from her Mormon family and the church itself; about our distance from nature; about democracy, freedom and responsibility; about communicating with stones. Williams is an ecosystem writer -- concepts in her world are joined together by physical and spiritual threads. For some, she can be too much. No vessel, least of all a book, can contain her.

A lot has happened to Williams in the last decade. Her beloved brother, Steven, died. She watched damage to the western landscape (particularly Utah and Wyoming) increase violently and exponentially. She fought for parts of that environment and got, for her efforts, front row seats to the Greed and Power Show. She went to Rwanda and heard survivors' stories of the genocide that will make every reader want to bury his or her head in disgrace. These things dropped like boulders into her cup and caused it to spill over.

What can a writer do when her world is splintered and her heart is full

Make mosaics. On the page.

"Finding Beauty in a Broken World" is a book written in tiles, in tesserae. Williams went to Ravenna, Italy, to apprentice in a mosaic workshop. She studied with a woman named Luciana: "Her work is unsigned, anonymous. . . . She has no belief in invention or innovation. 'It has all been done before,' she says. 'There are rules.' "

This humility (as well as the techniques she learned) informs Williams' method throughout the book. In Italy, Utah and Africa, she tries to expand her ability to understand the fragmented world. She tries to make a mosaic of it in her mind and on the page. The tools are difficult to master: humility, eloquence, dignity, grace. You can feel will in there too -- the raw effort to insist on beauty, even as others try to destroy it.

The book requires some effort, yes. The mind is not always ready to connect pieces for itself, especially in a world that is more than happy to make connections for you. But Williams fills "Finding Beauty in a Broken World" with so many glinting surfaces that the mind wants to connect them: the wide-open eyes of the prairie dog, and those of the mother watching her 5-year-old daughter raped and discarded; the bones in the American Museum of Natural History, and the bones in the church where 10,000 Rwandan people were murdered; the dignity of Lily, the artist who invited Williams and others to Rwanda to build a wall of names of the victims of the genocide, and that of William's own father, "direct and unapologetic in the losses he has suffered."