Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day

Diane Ackerman's essays take your breath away. They make you stop everything and sit in wonder. With simple assessable poetic prose she observes and gives voice to natural wonders...like snails, dew, sunrise, cattails, cranes in flight. The book's personal meditations average 1500 words each (about 5 small nicely spaced pages) and they are arranged according to the seasons, about 10 or 15 essays for each. The book is so rich that I took it in a little at a time, reading an essay every day or so, savoring the images and insights. After reading, I usually felt prompted to get outside and look around, to pay finer attention to what happens moment by moment outdoors in my own neighborhood, parking lot, or garden. Ackerman's most compelling quality is that of focused attention. With this focus she examines nature up close (bees in hives, moss on trees) and from this peering in nature's window she finds perspective about life's intimate truths. In a lovely piece describing a spider spinning her web, we learn about spiders in general and in particular, spiders that went on space missions, and how spider web spinning changes when weavers are given various drugs. Then a sweet commentary on how the web of the young spider shows the energetic excess of youth in extra layers of webbing. More mature spiders, we learn, spin better webs with fewer strands, using their energy more efficiently. "Dawn Light" is not just poetry and inspiration; it is also full of interesting facts astronomical, nautical, civil and biological. And passion: earth loving, sky scraping, life hugging, and wisdom seeking, celebratory passion. Reviewed by Marcia Jo

This is an elegant and beautifully written book. The author has gift for observation that is profound. The reader can expect to learn much about the first light of day. The research behind the various aspects of this book is extensive. Diane Ackerman is to be applauded for this treatise on the beginning of each and every day.

This is a book that I want to share with all my friends and family. I have already given it to quite a few and recommended it to many.Diane Ackerman was introduced to me many years ago when my daughter was reading Moon by Whale Light. She said it was the kind of book that, after every few pages, you want to go shake someone by the shoulder and say, " Hey, listen to this!" Dawn Light is that kind of book too. Diane Ackerman's delight in the world of nature and art is truly inspirational. Her exuberance reminds one of the beauty that surrounds us if we would only stop to look and listen to the natural world and to the world of art. She is a national treasure.

"Dawn Light" is a new work by storyteller/poet/naturalist Diane Ackerman, in which she, natch, considers the world around her at dawn. It is chock full of close personal observation, research, and learning and shows a distinct resemblance to her previous best-selling A Natural History of the Senses. It also, in its level of detail, animal-loving spirit, and lushly-written prose, shows its kinship to her recent New York Times best-seller,The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story. Ackerman gives us a year of dawns, as she considers that time of day at her homes in Palm Beach, Florida, and Ithaca, New York. We get her wonderfully fresh, sympathetic observations of the birds that sing dawn in, and all the other animals -- including us humans, she never lets us forget -- that then begin their days. She gives us a consideration of astronomy, particularly as it relates to dawn. But she does much more, roaming the current-day world, going as far as Australia's aborigines and India's holy rivers, to show us the dawn beliefs and rituals of other societies. She tells us that Jewish liturgy includes a list of blessings to be said first thing in the morning, one of them being thanks to God for giving us roosters to crow in dawn. The writer also goes backwards in time to the ancients, giving us a good picture of the learned Greek scientist Archimedes; explaining how the works of the well-known lesbian poet Sapho came to be saved in that wonder of the ancient world, the library at Alexandria, Egypt: then came to be lost, and partially found again. She explains long-ago Celtic, Nordic and Roman dawn legends and myths. Yet, although her mind is evidently full of facts, inclined to poetry, and interested in everything she sees around her and learns, she never overwhelms us, but wears all this information lightly. Well, let me moderate that previous statement slightly. Occasionally, very occasionally, she gets a little too intense for me; but I am not generally one to leap out of a warm bed of a cold winter's morning, not if I don't have to. Besides, her exploration and capture of winter's dawn, in upstate New York, at Ithaca, is thrilling; especially to me, who went to Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, and spent four years in that enchanted kingdom of the Finger Lakes. Many years ago now, I interviewed Dame Iris Murdoch, the outstanding Anglo-Irish writer, whose first published novel, Under the Net (Vintage Classics), was selected in 2001 by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. She asked where I'd gone to university, and I replied Cornell. She said she'd visited there, while working at Yale University, and it was "beautiful and mountainy," wasn't it. It surely was, and is. At any rate, I can remember one particular winter morning so clear and sharp that I did go out to clamber around the gorges, coming back only to find it was, to me, an astonishing minus 5 degrees

This is a book to be read, re-read, and then read once again. Ackerman's views of nature are enlightening, informative, and spiritually transcendental. Having read the book, I looked at daily miracles in a new way, using the scientific knowledge she incorporates to better understand things I'd before taken forgranted. I gave my copy of the book to my daughter who shares my delight in nature. I know I will buy myself another copy for a second and third read.