"Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision," Terry Tempest Williams tells us. "Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together." Ranging from Ravenna, Italy, where she learns the ancient art of mosaic, to the American Southwest, where she observes prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, to a small village in Rwanda where she joins genocide survivors to build a memorial from the rubble of war, Williams searches for meaning and community in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation.

In her compassionate meditation on how nature and humans both collide and connect, Williams affirms a reverence for all life, and constructs a narrative of hopeful acts, taking that which is broken and creating something whole....

When faced with the chaos of our times and tragedy in her own life, Terry Tempest Williams asked: How do we pick up the pieces? And what do we do with these pieces? To find her answer, this visionary author and naturalist embarked on a journey that took her around the globe. In Finding Beauty in a Broken World, she delivers a story, a mosaic, that is both heartbreaking and hopeful an unforgettable exploration of truth from a passionate artist and humanitarian. In this original author adaptation of her acclaimed book, Williams recalls an odyssey that began on the rocky shores of Maine, where she prayed for one wild word to follow after the events of 9/11. That word was mosaic and it marked the first step on a path that took her to the artistic heart of Italy, through ecological struggles in the American Southwest, and ultimately to war-torn Rwanda and the seemingly inconceivable task of fostering healing through the art of mosaic in the midst of genocide as villagers and artists build a memorial together. Presented by the author in her own inimitable words, here is an inspiring story of how we can overcome even the most traumatic wounding the world can offer. Finding Beauty in a Broken World is a call to listeners to create beauty in the world we find, each in our own way, each in our own time, each with our own gifts. By taking that which is broken and creating something whole we can begin to embrace both empathy and engagement within our own communities....

The beloved author of Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Red makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah.

As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams writes lyrically about the desert’s power and vulnerability, describing wonders that range from an ancient Puebloan sash of macaw feathers found in Canyonlands National Park to the desert tortoise–an animal that can “teach us the slow art of revolutionary patience” as it extends our notion of kinship with all life. She examines the civil war being waged in the West today over public and private uses of land–an issue that divides even her own family. With grace, humor, and compassionate intelligence, Williams reminds us that the preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one.


“Lush elegies to the wilderness. . . . Earthy, spiritual, evocative.” —The Boston Globe

“Erotic, scientific, literary. . . . Her intimacy with this landscape is complex and passionate.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Her finest writing . . . Use[s] pure language in the face of laws that need to be changed and lawmakers and citizens who need to understand that there is another way to see.” —Portland Oregonian
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Sociologist Terry Williams brings us a story straight out of today's headlines--teens becoming big-time drug dealers--and asks us to take another look at who is winning the war on drugs. "A breath-takting ethnographic account of young drug deadlers."--Boston Herald....

In her most original, provocative, and eloquently moving book since Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams gives us a luminous chronicle of finding beauty in a broken world. Always an impassioned and far-sighted advocate for a just relationship between the natural world and humankind, Williams has broadened her concerns over the past several years to include a reconfiguration of family and community in her search for a deeper understanding of what it means to be human in an era of physical and spiritual fragmentation.

Williams begins in Ravenna, Italy, where “jeweled ceilings became lavish tales” through the art of mosaic. She discovers that mosaic is not just an art form but a form of integration, and when she returns to the American Southwest, her physical and spiritual home, and observes a clan of prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, she apprehends an ecological mosaic created by a remarkable species in the sagebrush steppes of the Colorado Plateau. And, finally, Williams travels to a small village in Rwanda, where, along with fellow artists, she joins survivors of the 1994 genocide and builds a memorial literally from the rubble of war, an act that becomes a spark for social change and healing.

A singular meditation on how the natural and human worlds both collide and connect in violence and beauty, this is a work of uncommon perceptions that dares to find intersections between arrogance and empathy, tumult and peace, constructing a narrative of hopeful acts by taking that which is broken and creating something whole....