Celebrated conservationist Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge; When Women Were Birds) commemorates the centennial of the U.S. National Park Service with The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks. In 12 chapters, she explores 12 parks, their histories and futures. Ecology forms a natural overarching theme, but Williams's topics are variously personal, global and political. The places she visits range from Alaska to Maine to south Texas, while her subjects span broadly, including biodiversity and water shortages; suicide and hopelessness; continuing unrest in U.S. relations with Native Americans; climate change; political prisoners from around the globe; and the legacy of the Civil War. Her writing is poetic, passionate and unexpected.
In each chapter, Williams describes a visit to a specific national park, and then investigates the place and her experience there, sometimes directly through narrative storytelling and sometimes metaphorically. She begins with Grand Teton National Park, where her family has often returned over the decades and generations. The history of that park's founding and the establishment of the Parks System melds with her family story: "Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside." In her journeys, Williams finds beauty and distress over the future, and opines, "We continue to evolve and transform who we are in relationship to where we are."
By turns sad, despairing and hopeful, even thrilled in the presence of natural beauty, The Hour of Land is emotive, intelligent and well traveled. Williams celebrates the Park Service's centennial with a remarkable collection of wisdom and scintillating lines. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia