With her first book, Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams won an immediate reputation as an eloquent and impassioned naturalist-writer in the traditions of John Muir, Rachel Carson, and Wallace Stegner. Now Williams weaves together the power of her observation, in the field with her personal experience -- as a woman, a Mormon, and a Westerner -- into a resonant and often rhapsodic manifesto on behalf of the landscapes she loves. Through the grace of her stories we come to see how a lack of intimacy with the natural world initiates a lack of intimacy with each other.

In An Unspoken Hunger, Williams shadows lions on the Serengeti and spots night herons in the wasteland of the Bronx. She pays homage to the rogue spirits of Edward Abbey and Georgia O'Keeffe, contemplates the unfathomable wildness of bears, and directs us to a politics of place. The result is an utterly persuasive book-one that has the power to change the way we live upon the earth.

"These are rich meditations [with] strength and power.... From an examination of women's earliest mythic connections to the earth to the accounts of recent protests against nuclear testing, the idea of women as intermediary between earth and human conduct is interwoven throughout.... This is all good stuff, the kind of continuous exploration and adventure that makes a life into a pilgrimage."

Text from the book "An Unspoken Hunger: Stories From The Field" by Terry Tempest Williams,
© 1992 Terry Tempest Williams, published by Pantheon Books. Reprinted with permission of
Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc. - All Rights Reserved. Reproduction or redistribution of
this article is strictly prohibited.