A cult work in the United States and key in the history of environmental literature. The Great Salt Lake is nature at the foot of the city, a shifting shore that wreaks havoc on the roads. Islands too inhospitable and remote to be inhabited. Water in the middle of a desert, but so salty that we cannot drink it. The Great Salt Lake is the birds' irreplaceable refuge. Humans, politicians, engineers, look for solutions, but they think more about their infrastructures and comforts than about the needs and rights of their authentic and winged inhabitants. While facing the decline of these species, Terry discovers that her mother has cancer, as did eight other members of her family before her: they are "the clan of one-breasted women." All of this seems to be a consequence of the nuclear tests carried out in the nearby Nevada desert.