{"product_id":"finding-beauty-in-a-broken-world-isbn-9780375725197","title":"Finding Beauty in a Broken World","description":"\"Shards of glass can cut and wound or magnify a vision,\" Terry Tempest Williams tells  us. \"Mosaic celebrates brokenness and the beauty of being brought together.\" Ranging  from Ravenna, Italy, where she learns the ancient art of mosaic, to the American  Southwest, where she observes prairie dogs on the brink of extinction, to a small  village in Rwanda where she joins genocide survivors to build a memorial from the  rubble of war, Williams searches for meaning and community in an era of physical  and spiritual fragmentation. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In her compassionate meditation on how nature and  humans both collide and connect, Williams affirms a reverence for all life, and constructs  a narrative of hopeful acts, taking that which is broken and creating something whole.“\u003ci\u003eBeauty \u003c\/i\u003eis Williams's most important, most visceral, most demanding work. It should–no  must–be read.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Baltimore Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “An amalgam of art, intellect, ecology and spirit.  . . . Moving. . . . Terry Tempest Williams’s tools are words, ideas, sentences, fragments.  . . . She uses them to dig into chosen corners of our world, and to illuminate some  unknowns in flickering light.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Times  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“Sublime art. . . . An ambitious,  even audacious, work.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Denver Post \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Intense, tough, profound. . . . This is  an ambitious, risk-taking book that defies narrative conventions and avoids signpost  solutions. Yet it also prompts reflection, inspiration, and awe. . . . A resounding  hymn to creativity, community and engagement.” –\u003ci\u003eSeattle Post-Intelligencer \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“Williams  is an ecosystem writer–concepts in her world are joined together by physical and  spiritual threads... \u003ci\u003eFinding Beauty in a Broken World \u003c\/i\u003eoffers its answers in fragments,  pieces–as a mosaic must…. And yet there is always beauty.” –\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Wonderfully  descriptive.” –\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “In \u003ci\u003eFinding Beauty in a Broken World\u003c\/i\u003e, Williams  discovers her way along a path that, though at times obscured, leads to an unlikely  yet inspired destination. . . . Will stir and reward.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Oregonian \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[\u003ci\u003eFinding  Beauty in a Broken World\u003c\/i\u003e] explores deeper and more lyrical territory than other books  along the same theme.” –\u003ci\u003eArizona Daily Sun \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Part postmodern memoir, part historical  inquiry, part cultural critique and part spiritual meditation.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Salt Lake Tribune \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “This is an essential book. . . . Nonfiction in [Williams’s] hands is literature.”  –\u003ci\u003eThe Bloomsbury Review \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Terry Tempest Williams has half-broken my heart with everything  she has written. . . .  \u003ci\u003eFinding Beauty in a Broken World\u003c\/i\u003e will break your heart and  put it back together again. It is as powerful in its experiment with form as it is  in meaning.” –Bill McKibben\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Williams’s affecting prose, written with the skill and  economy of a poet, enlivens [\u003ci\u003eFinding Beauty in a Broken World\u003c\/i\u003e].” –\u003ci\u003eReal Change \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Poignant.  . . . Filled with the emotional honesty and grace that we’ve come to expect from  Williams.” –\u003ci\u003eHigh Country News \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Wide awake, utterly open, completely feeling. .  . . Williams\u003cbr\u003e presents us with an incredible achievement, a beautiful, terrible, wonderful,  hopeful witness. The farthest thing from insanity I’ve read.” –Alexandra Fuller,  author of \u003ci\u003eThe Legend of Colton H. Bryant\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e “Williams knows the earth and writes about  it with native intimacy, no matter the setting or continent.” –\u003ci\u003eMetro Santa Cruz \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Passionate. . . . [\u003ci\u003eFinding Beauty in a Broken World\u003c\/i\u003e] will not leave the reader with  the thought ‘all is well’ but with the challenged belief that the beauty in all life  can be–and must be–identified, believed in and brought forth.” –\u003ci\u003eNew Thought \u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Behave  with dignity. . . . Take the broken pieces you are given and find the new harmony  that holds your future. When you finish \u003ci\u003eFinding Beauty in a Broken World\u003c\/i\u003e you will  look at the landscape of your own life with new eyes.” –Blogcritics magazine \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “How  a book could be this gentle and this heartbreaking simultaneously I do not know.  . . . Terry Tempest Williams leads us with methodical accuracy into the devastations  and delights of now.” –John D’Agata, author of \u003ci\u003eHalls of Fame \u003c\/i\u003eTerry Tempest Williams is the award-winning author of fifteen books, including \u003ci\u003eRefuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eFinding Beauty in a Broken World\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eWhen Women Were Birds, \u003c\/i\u003eand, most recently,\u003ci\u003e The Hour of Land\u003c\/i\u003e. Her work has been widely anthologized around the world. She lives in Castle Valley, Utah, with her husband, Brooke Williams.We watched the towers collapse. We watched America choose war. The peace in our own hearts shattered.How to pick up the pieces?What to do with these pieces?I was desperate to retrieve the poetry I had lost.Standing on a rocky point in Maine, looking east toward the horizon at dusk, I faced the ocean. “\u003ci\u003eGive me one wild word.\u003c\/i\u003e” It was all I asked of the sea.The tide was out. The mudflats exposed. A gull picked up a large white clam, hovered high above the rocks, then dropped it. The clam broke open, and the gull swooped down to eat the fleshy animal inside.\u003ci\u003e“Give me one wild word to follow . . .\u003c\/i\u003e”And the word the sea rolled back to me was “m o s a i c.”Ravenna is the town in Italy where the west arm of Rome and the east arm of Constantinople clasped hands and agreed on a new capital of the Roman Empire in 402 AD. It was a pragmatic decision made by a shift in power, the decline of Rome and the rise of Byzantium. A spiritual history of evolving pagan and Christian perspectives can be read in a dazzling narrative of cut stones and glass.Eloquence is spoken through the labor of hands, anonymous hands of forgotten centuries. With eyes looking up, artisans rolled gold tesserae between their fingers in thought, as they searched for the precise placement in domes and apses where light could converse with glass. Jeweled ceilings become lavish tales. I want to understand these stories told through fragments. I am an apprentice in a mosaic workshop.Her name is Luciana. She is my teacher. Her work is unsigned, anonymous. Like the mosaicists before her who created the ancient mosaics that adorn the sacred interiors of this quiet town, she conducts the workshop in the traditional manner outlined centuries ago.The tools required: a hammer and a hardie. The hardie is similar to a chisel and is embedded in a tree stump for stability. A piece of marble, glass, or stone, desiring to be cut, is held between the forefinger and thumb of the left hand, placed perpendicular on the hardie. The hammer that bears two cutting edges, gracefully curved, is raised in the right hand. With a quick blow, a tessera is born, the essential cube in the crea- tion of a mosaic.Her name is Luciana. She is a mosaicist in the town of Ravenna. She has no belief in invention or innovation. “It has all been done before,” she says. “There are rules.”\u003ci\u003e1.The play of light is the first rule of mosaic.2.The surface of mosaics is irregular, even angled, to increase the dance of light on the tesserae.3.Tesserae are irregular, rough, individualized, unique.4.If you are creating horizontal line, place tesserae vertically.5.If you are creating a vertical line, place tesserae horizontally.\u003c\/i\u003e6.\u003ci\u003eThe line in mosaic is supreme; the flow of the line is what matters so the eye is never disturbed or interrupted.7.The background is very important in emphasizing the mosaic pattern. There must always be at least one line of tesserae that outlines the pattern. Sometimes there will be as many as three lines defining the pattern as part of the background.8.There is a perfection in imperfection. The interstices or gaps between the tesserae speak their own language in mosaics.9.Many colors are used to create one color from afar. Different hues of the same color were always used in ancient mosaics.10.The distance from which the mosaic is viewed is important to the design, color, and execution of the mosaic.11.The play of light is the first and last rule of mosaic.\u003c\/i\u003eLuciana will tell you once that you learn the rules of ancient mosaics, only then can you break them. She places a gold piece of glass between her finger and thumb on the hardie and holds the hammer at the base of its wooden handle. \u003ci\u003eTing\u003c\/i\u003e—she strikes the gold smalti into the exact shape she desires.“You can learn this technique in fifteen minutes,” she says. “It will take you a lifetime to master it.”A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken.\u003ci\u003eThe very language of tesserae tells us that this harmony is only achievable through the breaking and then rediscovery of the mosaic fragments.\u003c\/i\u003eNATASCIA FESTA, NittolaYou will see that the vibration, the movement, the tremor, the shimmering of that lapidary colour, of that colour of stone or enamel tessera is obtained also by staggering the connection between one tessera and another, by not putting them at the same level, often by making one protrude in respect to the one next to it so as to obtain effects of marginal refraction that give a value of vibration to the entire colour. GIULIO CARLO ARGAN, \u003ci\u003eMosaico d’amicizid fra i popoli\u003c\/i\u003eA mosaic is a conversation that takes place on surfaces.A mosaic is a conversation with light, with color, with form.A mosaic is a conversation with time.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303088017637,"sku":"NP9780375725197","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375725197.jpg?v=1767726894","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/finding-beauty-in-a-broken-world-isbn-9780375725197","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}