Finding Beauty in a Broken World

Starred review from August 18, 2008
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.

Starred review from August 1, 2008
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 thenbrings the understanding gleaned from working with tesseraeto her day-by-day observations of a beleaguered Utah prairie dog town. Williamsmarvels 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 brothers 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 thehorror of neighbors slaughtering neighbors in an attempted annihilation. Scientific in her exactitude, compassionate in her receptivity, and rhapsodic in expression, Williams has constructed abeautifulmosaic of loss and renewal that affirms, with striking lucidity, the need for reverence for all of life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)