Terry Tempest Williams

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning author of fifteen previous books TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS for a discussion of her latest book, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks, just as the National Park Service celebrates its Centennial this August.

About The Hour of Land

America’s national parks are breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why more than 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the environmental classic Refuge and the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, an exploration of what they mean to us and what we mean to them.

From the Grand Tetons in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas and more, Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and a manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America.

Praise

“A collection of essays that’s a personal journey as much as a meditation on the purpose and relevance of national parks in the 21st century . . . Williams’s language has its own visceral beauty . . . The Hour of Land is one of the best nature books I’ve read in years, filled with seductive prose . . . It’s impossible to do Williams’s thought-provoking insights and evocative images justice in a short review. My only advice is to read the book. And then read it again, with pen in hand. And then visit a national park, because as Williams reminds us, they are ‘portals and thresholds of wonder,’ the ‘breathing spaces for a society that increasingly holds its breath.’” —Andrea Wulf, The New York Times Book Review

“Williams (When Women Were Birds), a longtime environmental activist, adds a meditative element to memoir as she shares her abiding love for America’s open spaces . . . In passionate and insightful prose, Williams celebrates the beauty of the American landscape while reinforcing the necessity of responsible stewardship." —Publishers Weekly