A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis

Add to Wishlist

A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis

Paperback(Reprint)

$21.00

View All Available Formats & Editions

Paperback(Reprint)
$21.00

View All Available Formats & Editions

SHIP THIS ITEM

In stock. Ships in 1-2 days.
PICK UP IN STORE

Your local store may have stock of this item.

Available within 2 business hours

Want it Today?
Check Store Availability

Related collections and offers

Overview

An astonishing book by the prize-winning, bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses that reveals her parallel lives as an observer of the wildlife in her garden and as a telephone crisis counselor.

"(Ackerman) brings a luminous and illuminating combination of sensuality, science, and speculation to whatever she considers." --San Francisco Examiner

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679771333
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/31/1998
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.21(w) x 7.98(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

DIANE ACKERMAN has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in addition to garnering many other awards and recognitions for her work, which include the bestselling The Zookeeper's Wife and A Natural History of the Senses. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

	Preface	3
1	Borrowed Hearts	5
2	Squirrels, and the Dark Night of the Soul	26
3	All the Bright Catastrophes	45
4	A Mass of Life	62
5	The Golden Apples of the Sun, and Silver Apples of the Moon	81
6	The Shape of Fire	95
7	The Heart's Asylum	112
8	The Darkness of Our Days	135
9	So Glory Descends	162
10	The Orators of August	188
11	The World Unwound	208
12	Desperate Measures	236
13	A Last of Last Times	253
14	Before the Dawn	264
15	Close Calls	291
	Notes and Acknowledgments	295
	Index	297

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

In addition to her literary career, the author volunteers at a suicide-prevention center in a college town in New York State...."Most readers will come away...with a good deal of respect for Diane Ackerman and her fellow volunteer counselors." -- New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review

From Ackerman (Rarest of the Rare, 1995, etc.) come these graceful, canny reflections on her hours spent fielding calls at a suicide prevention center.
During "the long corridors of night, when problems can take on monstrous proportions," Ackerman sits in an ordinary room taking all-but-ordinary calls. Her phonemates are people on the raggedy edge, with voices of rising panic, rage, frustration, distant loneliness, but possessed of a precarious, tenuous hope that prompts them to telephone. She isn't a therapist, she isn't there to "[pick] problems apart and [make] sense of their origins and patterns." She is there to search for equilibrium, to be a friend for the duration, to examine options, to find windows and doors in a tunnel. She explores the degree of desperation in a caller's voice (imminent danger of suicide? a depression that may slacken?), knowing that "we hope our callers will choose life, but they have the option and the right to choose death." Nonetheless, she'll alert the police and call for a phone trace if things spin out of control. Ackerman's voracious imagination and curiosity find her making forays into biochemistry and the artistic temperament, the weather and Walt Whitman, bicycling and skiing, bringing them all to bear on her shifts at the crisis center. And it is not surprising that, as a writer of luminous essays on natural history, she is able to convincingly free-associate between the emotional geography of animals (a group of squirrels she is studying for a project) and humans, and compare her telephone work to the long- distance communication of whales, wolves, and birds.
One could do a lot worse than to find Ackerman at the end of the line when feeling those desperately slippery moments of despair, the rush into the unknown.

Kirkus Reviews

A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis

A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis

Paperback(Reprint)

Paperback(Reprint)

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews