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Marion Natural History Museum 8 Spring Street [2nd floor of Taber Library] Marion, Massachusetts 02738 The Natural History Book Club is a group of people interested in the natural world who meet monthly (approx) to discuss seminal titles, classic and contemporary, which relate to the world we live in. ALL ARE INVITED! Wednesday, May 20: - Refuge; an Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams. This haunting and very personal book by a highly regarded naturalist and a leading voice within the “deep ecology” movement (a reaction to the oxymoronic traditional approach of wildlife and wilderness management) deals with two parallel disasters. The first was the rise of the Great Salt Lake to unprecedented levels which flooded the greater salt lake basin, disrupting human activities as well as those of resident and migratory wildlife, especially birds. Tempest Williams documents the human political response and that of wildlife to this unprecedented event. Throughout the flooding in the mid 1980 Tempest Williams attended to her mother who was fighting cancer—a disease which had afflicted seven other female members of her immediate family, as well as many neighbors in the Mormon community in which she was raised. The cause of the cancer epidemic becomes understood during the years of her mother’s struggles for survival. This knowledge altered the attitudes of her father and siblings family towards the natural world. For a combination of ornithology, geography, mortality and faith, this fascinating book can’t be beat. Also Recommended : Finding Beauty in A Broken World, by Terry Tempest Williams has just been published and has received wide acclaim from a broad audience. Its subject may provide some comfort for those who despair of the loss of wild beauty around the globe. It is “a singular meditation on how the natural and human worlds both collide and connect in violence and beauty, this is a work of uncommon perceptions that dares to find intersections between arrogance and empathy, tumult and peace, constructing a narrative of hopeful acts by taking that which is broken and creating something whole.Discussions take place around a table; light refreshments will be served. Where: Marion Natural History Museum, on the 2nd floor of theElizabeth Taber Library, 8 Spring Street, Marion. When: 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, May 20 Questions? Please call 748-2947 |