Customer Reviews

Acquainted with the Night : Excursions Through the World After Dark

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a night owl and poetry-lover, I was intrigued by the title alone. Dewdney's writing is gorgeous: at turns it's funny, poignant, and illuminating. It's easy to tell the writer is a poet. At the same time, it's full of fascinating trivia and pieces of knowledge, covering history, physics, literature, astronomy, psychology, and philosophy.

This highly unusual examination of the phases of night will ensure that never again will you be oblivious of them. The author begins with the three stages of twilight---civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight, and ends with first light, the beginning of dawn.

In between he takes you through all the phases humans have assigned to the hours: dinner hour, children's bedtime, fireworks festivals, ghost- walking hours. Then there are the natural ones, such as the hour the nocturnal animals come out, stages of sleep, the best times for astronomical observations.

He does this in a poetic and engaging way, for this is no dry recitation of facts. Each hour has its own delights, and he exults in celebrating them and saluting them.

My only caveat is that his 'hours' are based on a northern European/American rhythm of the day. For them, "It is 11 pm and a great many people are asleep"---but in Spain they are just sitting down to dinner! It helps to remember the great variety of human behaviors in just about everything.

Read this book and fall in love with night!

This has now become my favorite book about the night. I liked this book better than "At Day's Close" by A. Roger Ekirch, which was more of a scholarly examination of a very specific subject: how night was experienced before electric lighting. That book was interesting, but in a dry, factual way. "Acquainted with the Night" is chock-full of facts, too, but covers a broader range of night-related themes (such as sunsets, constellations, insomnia, dreams, bedtime stories, nightclubs, even a visit to a sleep clinic) in 12 chapters - one for each of the 12 hours of the night -- and is written in a much more engaging, readable voice. The author is also a poet, which probably accounts for his writing style, and he intersperses night-related snippets of poetry into the book.

This book does contain one curious error, however. In the chapter entitled "The Art of Darkness" in which the author describes various famous paintings that depict night, he says about Edward Hopper's Nighthawks: "Outside, on the sidewalk in front of the windows, an anonymous man walks by, bathed in the green light flooding from the diner." Either Mr. Dewdney has never seen the painting and was repeating an erroneous description he was given or he was looking at a bad reproduction of it. I live in Chicago, where the original Nighthawks hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago: There is no man walking by outside the diner in Nighthawks. All four characters in the painting are inside the diner. I'm surprised that this mistake wasn't caught by the editors, and that no one else seems to have noticed it.

In spite of this error about one of my favorite works of art, I can't hold it against Mr. Dewdney when he has also portrayed the various aspects of night so evocatively. It's still worth reading.

This is an excellent meditative book on the night and what happens in our world when the sun goes down.
But sadly, this Canadian book by a Canadian author is not available for Canadian customers to purchase the e-book of on Amazon.
I still rate this book the full 5 stars that have been earned by my enjoyment of reading this excellent book, but if I could actually buy it for my kindle, I would appreciate it even more than I can rate.

An absolutely delightful book for those of us whose favorite time of day begins when the sun sets. Christopher does an excellent job of blending the world of science, culture, anthropology, history, astronomy and more to give the reader the most comprehensive book about night. It's very relaxing and gives the reader an excellent visual. The writer also blends some humor and personal experience. Very well done. Highly recommended for those who love night. The book will take you there.

Wonderfully intriguing -- an invitation to take a journey through the 12 hours of darkness, with a trustworthy and wise guide. This book is like a curiosity cabinet -- full of delightful items you've probably never considered before, some of which go bump, and some of which entrance: sleep, murder, dreams, bats, goddesses, astronomy, a wide variety of nocturnal creatures, meditations on philosophy, science and literature -- all explored with a poet's sensibility. Dewdney's interests in things of the night is so far ranging that I suspect not every single thing in the book with interest every single reader, and but where else could you discover that we are most sensitive to dust at 11 p.m. or, discover that the Panzer divisions invading Poland were on methamphetamine, or hear a comet described thusly: "there is something fascinating yet unearthly and menacing about a comet, as if it were a cold, phosphorescent angel of calamity - it hangs in the sky like a beautiful jinx." Lovely. Now, grab your lantern and a pair of stout boots, it's time for a little nocturnal wandering...

Ok, I did like this book. There were times, many times however, I wished it would drop the poetics and pick up the pace. There are many interesting FACTS in this book sprinkled through philosophy and poetics. Some of the potics just aren't that interesting to me. I'd say buy the paperback. It's a good decent book but not library worthy...read it and pass it on.

Chris

Last night I "finished" <u>Acquainted with the Night: Excursions through the world after dark</u> by Christopher Dewdney. I invoke the double quotation marks because I skimmed an awful lot of this book. That said, it did contain a great number of very interesting passages; I was greatly interested in the nocturnal animals, the stages of sleep, some of the astronomy etc. Much of the book is taken up by two-plus pages of waxing lyrical, that borders on purple, about the upcoming topic at the start of every chapter, and some of the most interesting fodder is reduced to what amounts to the listing of facts with little exposition. In these cases, we are being told many things we really already new. The section on mythology and others read like filler, and had a tenuous link to the topic at best anyway. Another problem was that the author intruded a little too much with very subjective (and, one might argue, ill thought out) comments. e.g. on the subject of famous insomniacs, the author comments on Marilyn Monroe:

Her pharmeceutical toolkit included Sulfathallidine, Librium, and the phenobarbital Nembutal. In the last year of her life it was thought she was taking up to twenty Nembutals a day. Although some acquaintances thought her death was suicide, the consensus was that it was brought about by an accidental overdose in combination with alcohol. In a sense, insomnia killed Marilyn Monroe.

I guess, in the sense that a guy with an itchy nose decides to scratch it with a chainsaw - you could say an itch killed the man. Hyperbole becomes nobody, least of all a non-fiction writer.

There are strange comments like this throughout the book. I'd say if you're interested in one area in particular, find a book on those subjects instead of this jack of all trades that barely gives enough time to any of the issues.