Deep Play (Paperback)

by Diane Ackerman (Author) "PLAY. It is an activity which proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside..." (more)
Key Phrases: deep play, spotted dolphins, Grand Canyon, Ayers Rock, Carl Sagan (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
"Deep play" is what helps humans survive, grow, and spiritually transcend, according to acclaimed poet and author Diane Ackerman. Children are of course drawn to deep play--those activities that catapult them into an altered state of consciousness, where all their senses are engaged and for that moment life is timeless and fully absorbing. But few adults are conscious of how this form of deep play continues throughout adulthood.

For athletes, deep play could embody the extreme and spiritually rewarding feats of mountain climbing or scuba diving, explains Ackerman. For lovers, it could be the compelling dance of courtship. Some find the act of making soup from scratch a form of deep play. For Ackerman, deep play has meant swimming with dolphins, writing poetry, piloting planes, and making sojourns to remote locations and sacred places. "Swept up by the deeper states of play, one feels balanced, creative, focused," explains Ackerman. "Deep play is a fascinating hallmark of being human; it reveals our need to seek a special brand of transcendence, with a passion that makes thrill-seeking explicable, creativity possible, and religion inevitable."

Ackerman's writing and metaphors are most engaging when she uses her fascinating life experiences to characterize how adults can engage in the rapture and ecstasy of deep play. This is a fascinating new territory of discussion, which could forever alter your approach to play in daily life. --Gail Hudson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
In a meandering meditation, poet and naturalist Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses, etc.) employs the term "deep play" to refer to a combination of what others sometimes call "flow" or "the zone" and what anthropologists call "sacred play." Her subject can be understood as intensity, or even ecstasy, those moments of heightened experience when the mind and senses are working at full capacity. Her acknowledgments page bears a portent for readers as she mentions previous essays on poetry, ceremony and eco-psychology, travel pieces on Gauguin and the Grand Canyon, and more: to fit her broad conceit, she's shoehorned in a wide range of her activities. At her best, which usually comes when she is writing about something observable (e.g., standing amid penguins in Antarctica), Ackerman can beguile readers with fine turns of phrase. But when she indulges her weakness for abstraction, she can get airy. Musing on her application to the "Journalist in Space" program and the future of commonplace space flight, she declares: "What wonderful fields of deep play await us in space!" Poetry "is an act of deep play," she asserts, in an interesting if somewhat off-point account of writing and teaching. Some of her conclusions settle for a dismaying level of generalization as when, citing her experiences with soccer players and cycling magazines, she suggests that professional athletes are businesslike, while amateurs are more playful. Ultimately, the book is more confusing than illuminating, and, oddly, more labored than playful. Agent, Cullen Stanley of Janklow & Nesbit. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (August 8, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679771352
• ISBN-13: 978-0679771357
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #230,936 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Deep vanity, June 1, 2005

By	Laramie (Pacific Northwest) - See all my reviews

Deep play (aka "Flow") is a valuable concept, but don't expect to find any intelligent exposition of it here. Instead, prepare for confusion as seemingly disparate phenomena -- rituals, hallucinations brought on by starvation, and Sunday morning reveries in the park -- are evinced as examples of "deep play". Just how and why these should be lumped together with creative flow is never adequately explained.

All in all, this is a rambling, entirely unsystematic and underresearched book, notwithstanding the author's credentials as a naturalist.* Worse still, as Wolfgang Pauli would say, it is "not even wrong". It has nothing to say, for page after page after page.

Well, not nothing exactly. As an indulgent exercise in vanity, it's worth a titter or two. The author, whose photo reveals a woman of a certain age in King Charles-style tresses, loses no opportunity to remind you the reader that she knows how to live. "I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings. If you lead a relatively narrow life, I suppose you never notice. But I've always been athletic"... etc etc. Mostly she goes on in this vein, larding up her exploits with new age musings that even I --liberal, female and eco-minded-- found eminently gagworthy. Reader be warned, though: a dark episode intrudes on page 100, as Ackerman takes NASA to task for having had the temerity to reject her for the Journalist in Space program. Her explanation: NASA feared she might say something "wise and profound."[!]

Whatever the case, don't hold your breath waiting for her to say it in this book.

*Serious readers of psychology would do better to consult Czikszentmihalyi's outstanding research on "Flow", while those interested in play in the natural world will adore Bernd Heinrich's Mind of the Raven.

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars not very deep, February 19, 2001

By	M. H. Bayliss "book queen" - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I don't want to sound like a curmedgeon, but this book is, to put it mildly, way too self-indulgent. I too like to bike and think, "Wow, the world is a great place," but I truly didn't think anyone else would care. This is a self-indulgent recap of "neat things Diane Ackerman has done in her life" loosely tied together by this deep play idea she gets from Huizinga without ever citing the original source material. It's not that I didn't enjoy reading it -- I did. It reminds me of reading a diary or a travel-log of a friend's adventures. But, compared to her other works, this is fluff with too much of a focus on the author. If the author hadn't been well-known, this never would have been published.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars deep disappointment, June 10, 2003

By A Customer

I've enjoyed Ackerman's other books, but this one failed to engage me. It did seem like she stitched a bunch of diary pages together and sent it to her publisher. She's a beautiful poet, but this time her thoughts seemed scattered with only the most lackaidasical attempt on her part to synthesize them.

Usually, I enjoy her style, but I was especially distracted this time trying to keep the relationship between her personal anecdotes and the deep play theory straight.

I have to admit, though, the paperback version has one of the most gorgeous covers I've ever seen. It's sad when more effort appears to have gone into a book's design than its content, though.