And what a tour guide she is. A naturalist, writer, and native of Utah, Williams is probably best known for her 1992 memoir Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place about losing her mother to cancer just as the Great Salt Lake floods, threatening the migratory birds Williams treasures. She's extremely knowledgeable, she loves wild places with a passion, and she possesses what I can only call a beautiful spirit: generous, gentle, peace-loving, compassionate. Plus, she's a terrific and highly poetic writer.
It's a pleasure to tour the country in her company, even when she's surveying wrenching scenes like the damage inflicted on Gulf Islands National Seashore by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 or the encroachments of the Bakken oil fields on Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. More often what she surveys is sublime, from Alaska's Gates of the Arctic and Wyoming's Grand Teton to Acadia National Park in Maine. She even makes a stop at Effigy Mounds National Monument here in Iowa.
Particularly pleasurable is the variety of approaches Williams takes to her park descriptions, focusing closely at times on ecology or American history, then shifting her lens to her own life and family. She includes letters, emails, and journal entries to fine effect and provides a wonderful personal anecdote about Lady Bird Johnson. Modern readers, who may be unaware of how our great park system got started, learn about the unflagging philanthropic and environmental efforts of such National Park greats as Laurence Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt, Stewart Udall, and many others. This book's a lavish banquet of luscious park detail and I, for one, could not get enough of it. How I wish Williams had visited all 58.
~Ann, Adult Services
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