So many capacities

As much about the sighting of majestic birds in the Great Salt Lake and Utah’s red desert as about a daughter’s precious love for her ailing mother, Terry Tempest Williams links flight to heaven, and both to her abiding faith. Neither novel nor memoir, the short chapters observe, inhale and exhale, capture and convey, e.g., the genetic or ancestral knowledge lost by birds with changes in temperature and salinity, the day-to-day accommodations of cancer in a family. How to understand spirit in petroglyphs and wings, how to touch beauty in bedrock and salt water, how to weave a necklace from forks and floss – these thought-fragments resonate in Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.