Williams has that all-too-rare ability to shed her own shoes and don the footwear of the Dine as she guides us on her journey through Navajoland. We learn about Navajo mythology and ritual. We see how the people respond to their environment, creating themselves in the process.

One of my favorite passages deals with a young woman's coming-of-age ceremony, Kinaalda. A young woman's ability to give life is celebrated through a ceremony that can last up to five days. Blessings are heaped upon her, her jewelry is washed along with her hair while the community sings "Songs of Dawn" and prepares a special cake. How different from American culture. We do not have a cultural celebration, acknowledging the life-giving potential of young women. Adolescent girls may get a clinical explanation of mesntruation during gym class at school. No party here! And more often than not, a girl feels this is something that must remain hidden from the community. If she's lucky, she has a best friend in whom she can confide. Navajo people celebrate the life-giving potential of a young woman. What an empowering message this must send to Navajo girls as they celebrate this ritual communally.

Pieces of White Shell is full of earth wisdom. Landscape--especially the mountains. They come alive through the story of their origins. Yucca. So many different uses for this desert plant. Soap, sandals, baskets, games, food. Stories of animals. Coyote--that border figure on the edge of the profane and sacred. Deer--Deer Gods giving instruction on how they should be hunted and used.

Pieces of White Shell is a book that I savor again and again. And it always satisfies.

Thanks to enviromental work featured by Watkins,Utah hasForthcoming new title- added a vast million acres+ wilderness area. watch for his "Red Rock Chronicles" coming by 2000.

A worthy anthology of short stories paying tribute and articulating the spirituality of the wild public domain lands of Utah. Anyone who has spent time hiking, camping, or otherwise experiencing the unique deserts and mountains will enjoy and relate to the stories shared by contributors who are various well-known icons from diverse backgrounds promoting a land conservation ethic. The good writing really makes the places come alive. This book was prepared in an effort to tell the story and promote the protection of the wild lands of Utah. I have experienced living in and enjoying these lands first hand. The book hits the mark - it inspires a similar awe of the actual natural experience of these lands even in a mining engineer like myself. The book reinforces the true reality that many of these lands deserve strict protection for the enjoyment of those who seek wilderness, solitude, and a temporary recess from the insane.

Having worked in the heavy industrial electrical/mechanical field for the past 26 years, I have worked at many facilities similiar to those illustrated in this book. I love them! You can say what you'd like regarding their environmental impact, but I can tell you, these are great places to work. The process is usually very interesting, and the customer most always demands a quality job. So...there's some polution, but not one of you reading this review can say that your purchasing habits, and style of life has not contributed to the very images that you would now turn your nose up at. Sure, the EPA would love to have you believe that they are cleaning up the world, when the fact is, they are only driving real industry out of the USA, only to produce the same if not more 'polution' over the borders. And with our governments blessing. 'Still buying the same products, are you not? Look and see where they were made next time! It makes me sad to see these big industrial sites closed down. I love the book, because I can show my kids, and my grandkids the types of places that used to exist in this country_The type of places that has enabled us to go around as the police department of the world, and enforce what WE deem as right on every continent of the earth. It would have made a nice closing statement though, if you would have included an arial shot of the Pulp & Paper Mill that produced the pages of this book. I am assuming that is, that they were made in the USA.

The book captures a remarkable series of photos of desert canyons. The photos are good enough to keep the book on my office conference table. Ms. Williams' text provides stories of people encountering wilderness at the near edge of mystic experience.

Straight to my heart. If you love the red rocks and enjoy Terry's writing, this is it. The photography is excellent!

Coyote's Canyon is a collection of photography of the Southwestern US, coupled with Terry Tempest Williams's haunting prose. The photographs are, by and large, rich and full of the sense of the desert. The collection of short essays by Williams includes two of my absolute favorite stories about the Southwest--the one about the Man who Buries Poems, and the one about finding the Perfect Kiva. Worth the read, for anyone who yearns for the desert, or who lives there and wants to rediscover an appreciation for its magic, both in photographs and in lyrical prose.

As the title of one of Terry Tempest Williams' essays states... this collection of immersions into spirit and place are "The Erotics of Place." That is, not just a bodily immersion into her subject, but one of totality. Williams accomplishes that sinking into her well-worded ideas that leaves only the tips of her hair floating on the surface, a faint rippling of the water where she stepped in, and nothing more - she is submerged. And that is a thing of quality.

The essays in this short collection touch on lives of people as well as life force of place. Williams writes about Georgia O'Keefe in "In Cahoots with Coyote" with evident love for the woman, the artist, the landscape: "What O'Keefe saw was what O'Keefe felt - in her own bones. Her brush strokes remind us again and again, nothing is as it appears: roads that seem to stand in the air like charmed snakes; a pelvis bone that becomes a gateway to the sky; another that is rendered like an angel; and 'music translated into something for the eye.'" The essay concludes with Williams, O'Keefe, and coyotes in the canyons of southern Utah howling in harmony.

Williams writes a eulogy for Edward Abbey, another spirit polished by desert sand. She sees Abbey as the leader of a growing Clan, a clan of human coyotes reclaiming their land, "...individuals who are quietly subversive on behalf of the land. And they are infiltrating our neighborhoods in the most respectable ways, with their long, bushy tails tucked discreetly inside their pants or beneath their skirts... not easily identified, but there are clues. You can see it in their eyes. They are joyful and they are fierce. They can cry louder and laugh harder than anyone on the planet..."

This is that total immersion Williams renders so well. Her people essays blend seamlessly with her place essays; they are the same, as they should be, she reminds us, the same. "We call its name," she writes of the earth around her, "and the land calls back."

Williams makes political statements in her work. It is her coyote howl to call together an awareness of the destruction of land all around us. She addresses nuclear testing not only as a naturalist, but as a woman born in a family riddled with breast and ovarian cancer. She addresses conservation as a necessity for continued life on earth, not merely as a question of quality of life. Her call is not militant - it is one of lyrical love for the preservation of the gift we have been given, the natural world that sustains us.

Beautiful and lyrical. Terry has done it again.

Terry Tempest Williams is a wonderful writer. All of her books are a delight. This book is a collection of several essays, each a jewel. When I read her writings I feel very connected to myself and to nature.

There are few books I dislike, but this book was one of the few that came close. While I enjoyed some of Austin's imagery, it seemed she went around in circles and never get to a destinaton. It was like reading a bunch of settings, but never getting any plot. The highlight of the book was Seyavi, the basket maker but the book itself seemed to be lacking. If you're looking for nature writing, read Linda Hogan's "Dwellings." It's a lot more personal.

I used to live write down the street from Mary Austin's old house in the Owen's Valley. I found her life very interesting and maybe from reading this book you get more of an inside on what her life was like.

Austin lived in the Owens Valley during a turbulent period at the turn of the century, and she observes the people and wild things dwelling there with a novelist's eye. But what sets this gem above all the rest is simply her writing, the plain beauty of her voice and phrasing. She achieves a tone that is somehow at once wistful and tinged with levity, very gently ironic yet always loving. Her words caress their subjects like -- well, like the pen and ink drawings that graced the original publication in 19-ought-whatever. They evoke all the richness of the place, its austerity, its pathos, its beauty, with a gentle affection that is sweet but never cloying, sometimes sad but never downcast. It has a kind of Zen translucency, filtered through the gently humorous, sensitive lens of a literary genius.

After recently reading the powerful memoir Refuge, I was eager to read Leap, but I was very disappointed. I guess I was expecting some profound insights into the painting by Bosch and Tempest Williams' interesting religious background, but instead, I found myself reliving a night school creative writing class experience I took years ago. For example:

"What am I not hearing? A loss of sight. What am I not seeing? Becoming numb. The dismantling of the self."

The writing in this book is terrible--it literally made my stomach turn. In fact, the scenes of "Hell" in the painting in the appendix were more palatable than the writing. Hopefully the apparent lack of interest in this book will motivate Tempest Williams to actively improve her considerable writing skills, focus more on her loyal audience, and develop a sense of humor--this gifted woman takes herself much too seriously.

You need not being a devoted fan of Terry Tempest Williams or Bosch, but you must abandon all thoughts of literary "tradition" while you read this. She's breaking tradition, linear thought, and countless other rules we associate with great writing. But if you open yourself--there is pure brilliance behind those pages. Passion behind her words.

Leap places a powerful grip on the reader as Williams takes you through the panels of the triptic, through her life and the life of the painting. What does it mean to surrender to your passions? An inquisitive look at at painting that will turn you inside out, take you in circles, through heaven and hell and somewhere along the way, you'll find restoration.

When do we ever take the time to stop and smell the roses, or to indulge our obsessions, or to give our inner voice the time it deserves? This author did all those things, and then went a step further in getting her observations and insights down. She's a smart and introspective writer and my mind is whirling from her journey with the painting. This is a risky book... she admits we may find her crazy, and I did at times. But being in her wild, cerebral, artistic zone was not boring or banal... this book is not a superficial beach read. It made me want to look harder and deeper at the world around me and to listen with attentive ears. Bravo! Bravo!

The photo by Richard Misrach on the cover of In Response To Place may be the high point of the collection. Several other Misrach images inside the book also compel but the rest of the work seems disjointed and uninteresting by comparison. Overall, I was terribly disappointed by this volume.

Conceptually, the notion of a group of artists responding aesthetically to a specific (Last Great) place as a theme for a photo-essay is intriguing. One can easily imagine how such a project might soar. Although individual photographs in this collection are indeed stirring, there is something about the portfolio as a whole which fails to satisfy; either as a cohesive statement on the need for preservation of endangered ecosystems, or as a presentation of art photography by a dozen acclaimed practitioners.

Another volume devoted to highlighting photographically the need for care and protection of precious spaces on Earth comes to mind here. Although not as highly specific thematically as In Response To Place, The World Wildlife Fund's spectacular Living Planet does a wonderful job of creating a vivid, consistently cogent statement on the immanence of place; something The Nature Conservancy's offering simply fails to do.

A beautiful book that really tells a story and celebrates nature in a unique way. A great gift for anyone who appreciates natural beauty.

In Response to Place is an amazing book! The pictures really draw you into the mind of the photographers and into the slendor of nature in its many forms! I was lucky enough to see the exhibition while it was in Washington, DC.

While the book cannot possibly evoke the same feelings of awe as the individual pictures hanging on the wall, it sure isn't a bad substitute if you cannot see them and it is a wonderful reminder if you can!

Mediocre, with a few moments of good writing, but the entire theme is contrived. Spend your money on real environmental writing, for example Paul Shepard and Jerry Mander.

Although the contributors to this book are all Mormons the plea they make is universal. Our ties to God's creations are real. We derive emotional and spiritual strength from them. The earth is given to us as a stewardship from God, to use, but also to protect and "replenish". The contributors cite personal examples to explain their interpretation of this "stewardship." I recommend this book!