Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert

The beloved author of Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams is one of the country’s most eloquent and imaginative writers. The desert is her blood. In this potent collage of stories, essays, and testimony, Red makes a stirring case for the preservation of America’s Redrock Wilderness in the canyon country of southern Utah.

As passionate as she is persuasive, Williams writes lyrically about the desert’s power and vulnerability, describing wonders that range from an ancient Puebloan sash of macaw feathers found in Canyonlands National Park to the desert tortoise—an animal that can “teach us the slow art of revolutionary patience” as it extends our notion of kinship with all life. She examines the civil war being waged in the West today over public and private uses of land—an issue that divides even her own family. With grace, humor, and compassionate intelligence, Williams reminds us that the preservation of wildness is not simply a political process but a spiritual one.

“Lush elegies to the wilderness…. Earthy, spiritual, evocative.” —The Boston Globe

“Erotic, scientific, literary…. Her intimacy with this landscape is complex and passionate.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Her finest writing… Use[s] pure language in the face of laws that need to be changed and lawmakers and citizens who need to understand that there is another way to see.” —Portland Oregonian