The hour of land : a personal topography of America's national parks /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

America's national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds , returns with The Hour of Land , a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.

From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Williams (Finding Beauty in a Broken World) honors the 2016 centennial of the National Parks system with a memoir about her personal experiences with a dozen parks and national monuments. She includes the history of each and a description of what each is like today. She talks with Park Service employees and park enthusiasts. She writes not only about the well-known Grand Teton, Glacier, and Canyonlands but also about Effigy Mounds in northeastern Iowa and the Gulf Island National Seashore in Mississippi. She crosses the country from Acadia in Maine to Alcatraz in California. "What are we searching for and what do we find?" she asks. "It is not so much what we learn that matters but what we feel in relationship to a world beyond ourselves." Williams narrates her book with dignity and clarity, giving a quiet urgency to heed "the clarion call for the preservation of wilderness for our future." VERDICT Highly recommended. ["Of interest to travelers, historians, environmentalists, and anyone concerned about the past, present, and future of this country's protected landscapes": LJ 4/15/16 review of the Sarah Crichton: Farrar hc.]-Nann Blaine Hilyard, Winthrop Harbor, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Williams (When Women Were Birds), a longtime environmental activist, adds a meditative element to memoir as she shares her abiding love for America's open spaces. She grew up in Utah, home to five national parks and seven national monuments, and writes of places such as the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, Big Bend National Park in Texas, and Glacier National Park in Montana. Some parks are new to Williams, and others are deeply familiar: Williams's great-grandfather introduced Grand Teton National Park to his son, who introduced it to his sons, who in turn introduced it to her. Chapters on Big Bend and the Gulf Coast give Williams opportunities to address political and environmental issues, particularly calls for a wall to separate the U.S. from Mexico. "The 118-mile border that Big Bend National Park shares with Mexico would be closed not only to humans," but to the "movement and migration" of an array of species that "have no understanding of man-made borders," she writes. Similarly, her discussion of the Gulf Islands National Seashore centers on BP and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In passionate and insightful prose, Williams celebrates the beauty of the American landscape while reinforcing the necessity of responsible stewardship. Illus. Agency: Brandt & Hochman Literary. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Williams (When Women Were Birds, 2012), an ardent, often rhapsodic, always scrupulous witness to the living world and advocate for the protection of public lands, celebrates the centennial of the National Park Service in this enrapturing and encompassing chronicle of her deeply inquisitive, meditative, and dramatic sojourns in a dozen national parks. Guided by a finely calibrated moral compass and acute attunement to the spirit of the land, Williams approaches these protected places with curiosity about the past and concern for the future, matching ravishing and knowledgeable descriptions of land and wildlife with personal stories, swaths of history and reportage, profiles of remarkable individuals dedicated to preserving the wild, and evocative commentary. She begins with the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, which she and her family have hiked for decades. Family lore brackets Williams' stirring account of the vision and generosity of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who, steered by Horace Albright, the second director of the National Park Service, quietly bought up land in order to donate it to the federal government so that the original park would be extended to include the entire Snake River Valley. This grand philanthropic act ignited a political firestorm and an epic fight in Congress, though it is now appreciated as a magnificent gift to all humankind, an evolution in perception to keep in mind as we face our own environmental battles. Not all her adventures are so affirming. North Dakota's Theodore Roosevelt National Park is under siege as the natural-gas boom encroaches on its borders with clanking rigs, pollution, scraped land, trucks in traffic, dust. In all, 42 national parks are threatened by oil and gas development. This dire predicament inspires Williams to ponder the ongoing conflict between protection and use of public lands. What she finds on her trip to Gulf Islands National Seashore, one of eight national parks damaged by the BP oil disaster in 2010, is even more distressing. Her time in Big Bend National Park on the Rio Grande along the border between Texas and Mexico engenders penetrating musings about need, fear, and drought. As for the wall politicians tout, Williams testifies to the grievous harm such an edifice would inflict on wildlife as well as people. Questions of justice and sacredness arise in her dispatch from Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, while her probing explorations of the Gettysburg National Military Park summon thoughts about the unending echoes of the Civil War. Illustrated with exquisite photographs by such masters as Lois Conner, Lee Friedlander, Sally Mann, and Sebastião Salgado, this is a uniquely evocative, illuminating, profound, poignant, beautiful, courageous, and clarion book about the true significance of our national parks. These sanctuaries, Williams muses, are not only about preservation and recreation, but also about education and remembrance. She envisions them as places of recognition, vital centers of awe and unity, inspiration and transformation. Williams writes, If we can learn to listen to the land, we can learn to listen to each other. And the time is now: We have arrived at the Hour of Land. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

In commemoration of the centennial of the National Park Service, Williams (When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice, 2012, etc.) explores 12 diverse parks. There are few contemporary nonfiction writers who can capture the essence of the American wilderness landscape as eloquently and intimately as Williams. Noted for writing about the American West, her distinctive prose style is capable of conveying a deep spiritual dimension within the physical setting. This is very much in evidence in her latest book, a broadly ambitious and deeply impassioned collection of essays on a select group of settings within the national park system. Her writing expands beyond recreational parks to include battlefields, monuments, and seashores. Williams reflects on personal ties to locations such as Grand Teton and stretches across the country to Arcadia National Park, where she discovers familial roots going back several generations. Other locations, such as Big Bend National Park and Alcatraz Island, offer first-time encounters. Williams provides well-documented histories of many of these parks, yet a more consistent thread running throughout the book touches on the rapid changes incurred in recent decades, primarily related to the destructive effects of climate change or by the interference and conflicting interests of the federal government and the oil industry. The author heartbreakingly examines the Gulf Islands National Seashore and the mass devastation caused by the 2010 BP oil spill. Williams' message for preserving and respecting these sights is heartfelt, but she has a tendency to occasionally overstate her message, and her calls to action sometimes veer toward rants. Her writing is most powerful and convincing when she allows her subtle and often sublime reflections to shine forth: "No matter how much we try to manage and manipulate, orchestrate, or regulate our national parks, they will remain as the edge-scapes they are existing on the boundaries between culture and wildnessimprovisational spaces immune to the scripts of anyone." An important, well-informed, and moving read for anyone interested in learning more about America's national parks. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

She is the award-winning author of Leap, An Unspoken Hunger, Refuge & most recently Red - A Desert Reader. She lives in Castle Valley, Utah.

(Bowker Author Biography)