Two things happen at once. The Great Salt Lake rises to record levels through the mid-eighties and drowns the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where Williams has watched birds her whole life. And her mother is dying of ovarian cancer, as her grandmother did, in a family full of the same cancers. The book braids them, chapter by chapter, each headed by a bird and a lake elevation. The last section is the one everybody remembers, in which she names what the family lived downwind of in the fifties. It’s the book that propelled her to a household name, and I’m not even close to partial about it, as I was with Terry in Mexico during Day of the Dead, which appears toward the end of the book.
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place