Customer Reviews

A Slender Thread : Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis

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

 

 

Perhaps my interest in psychology, wildlife and science make me a bit biased here, but I adore this book. It is one of those that I will continuously return to. I wasn't planning on reviewing this book, but I was compelled by the one star reviews that complained about Ackerman's backyard observations. Perhaps they missed the "slender thread" (forgive the play on words) but it was about so much more than a few squirrels and birds. It is difficult to explain in words, but the balance between the heartache in the book and Ackerman's personal experiences created an amazing and comforting feeling that I enjoyed each time I picked up the book. I do not recommend this book as a introduction to this author, but those who already love Ackerman's style will delight in it. Her style is very personal and her books often have personal anecdotes and stories which I very much enjoy, but if that sort of thing isn't for you, you may not enjoy this book.

In reading A SLENDER THREAD, something amazing happened: my already worshipful esteem for Ms. Ackerman increased dramatically. A fan from the first words of the bestselling A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES, I didn't think it possible for Ms. Ackerman's boundless curiosity and breathtakingly poetic prose to get any better. But in this new book, the metaphors and the subjects they describe are indeed large as life.
After donating a laptop computer to her local crisis prevention chapter, Ms. Ackerman is lured into giving a speech to its staff, and ultimately becomes a staff-member herself, as a volunteer answering phones for the suicide prevention hotline. Her oddessey of aiding those in distress is beautifully undertaken and even more beautifully described.
At first, the seemingly fearless Ackerman (who has a private pilot's license, scuba dives, is an accomplished horsewoman, and has even sexed crocodiles) is nervous about her abilities at crisis intervention. After the several weeks of training, she still feels apprehensive about responding to callers' crises. But like everything else in the author's incomparable ouevre, life beckons and blazes tantalizingly, and she handles adeptly the callers on the other end of that slender thread.
Some people are mired in bogs of depression, others struggling with abusive relationships, while a few are at the brink of suicide. In the stunning climax, Ackerman, from her isolated perch at Suicide Prevention's offices, rescues two desperate souls in a single evening: a teen only seconds from a fatal leap, and a frequent caller whom Ackerman finally realizes from faint clues has already ingested a potentially fatal dose of pills. In reading this late chapter, one's pulse races as frantically as the author's.
But in between her shifts, Ackerman celebrates in her typically effervescent way, many of nature's splendors. From weekend bicycle rides around Upstate New York's Finger Lakes region, a two-year study of her backyard squirrels, and a rollicking full moon cross country skiing trek to the strains of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," among other delightful rituals. Ackerman is an impassioned participant in all of life's rich pageants.
(And this sentence, quiet as it is, jolts one out of blind admiration for this intrepid soul: "Some of our counselors, like me, are ones who survived, people who lived to see their lives turn around, and who relish life more because they came so close to losing it.") Yes, a joyous life, but not without its share of troubles. Fortunately, the worst our fiercely talented explorer experiences in these pages are a couple of broken toes. One from a misstep on a neighbor's porch, the other a casualty of her own wheelchair.
In A SLENDER THREAD Diane Ackerman has outdone herself. She has turned her poetically tuned naturalist's curiosity to our own fragile species, and composed an elegant song of survival, endurance, and brilliant life

Not just an account of Ackerman's volunteer work on a suicide hotline. Like all of her books, it leads to connections and meditations on many subjects. Sit back, relax, and enjoy where this book meanders.

As a director of a crisis line that is similar tothe one Diane
writes about I feel that she captures the feelings of a volunteer.
The workers not knowing what the next caller may want or need. It may be to
talk or it may be to say goodbye.She covers all the callers we are so fimilar with the alcoholic,
the abused spouse , hopeless teenager, the bogus sex callers looking for a female voice , the chronically
mentallyill and the sucides that we all fear.

Diane makes me more aware of my feelings about the thousands of calls that our crisis line has taken and in a way assures me that we do make a dfferance,

I am reading this book for the second time as I'm currently in a training program for potential crisis counselor volunteers. With the very small amount of exposure I've had to what being a crisis counselor is like, I do think that Ackerman's portrayal is very accurate. I can certainly understand her frustrations over not being able to fix her callers' problems and her intense curiosity about what her callers are like in person. The book is beautifully written and, while I like the juxtaposition of her life as a naturalist with her life as a crisis counselor, I must admit I do find myself skipping over the chapters devoted to squirrels and birds in order to get to the "good stuff." All in all, "A Slender Thread" is an account of human crises that leaves the reader with hope rather than despair.

A beatifully written book by a highly actualized woman. Wonderfull to know there are people like her. One comment. "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. (p92?) And alas, had the founding fathers declared personal intoxication our god given birthright what kind of world might we live in today?

What to make of this book? First of all, it is beautifully written, and very easy to picture the callers, the Crisis Center and those who work the phones. Unfortunately, that's part of the problem.

If I, who am not well-traveled, recognize the approximate area where Ackerman did her crisis work, how much more transparent is it to people who actually live there? The jacket flap says she lives in Ithaca. Given people's penchants for seeing themselves in characters, how could some of the area's inhabitants not recognize themselves, however prettily they are disguised? Also, (spoiler) she helps prevent several suicides, the details of which are rendered very intimately. Even if the disguises hold up, won't some people be nervous about phoning a crisis center, worried that they'll end up as fodder for someone's book? I would be. Sheesh, callers in crisis often feel naked enough.

Also, despite illusions to Ackerman's less than perfect past, I kept wondering how she could have so much empathy for the callers. From what she tells us, she spends her free time, biking, gathering flowers and lolling in the bath. Her callers are dealing with a "reality" that is considerably more grim.

But even if you skip the non-crisis center parts, it's still a valuable book for understanding the despair that the human soul can feel.

by a masterful wordsmith with moving passages about crisis line, life, squirrels, etc.

As a volunteer at a local crisis center, Diane Ackerman gets to explore the human psyche. She traverses the human drama with a sense of compassion. She answers calls from a wide variety of people in her local area. She tells the story of a college student dealing with a drunken roommate and a frightened and depressed woman who has taken a bottle of Tylenol. Each call is a private drama and at times the stories created an emotional response.

Diane Ackerman's writing style and careful observations allow you to feel the pain of the callers. I will admit that it did at times feel insensitive when she alternated between stories of her enjoyment of life (baths, watching squirrels, biking) with the stories of people's pain. There are stories of squirrels interspersed with stories of people wanting to jump off bridges. She at times digresses into talking about depressed polar bears or how she watched a moth for hours out in nature.

She discusses famous people with manic-depression and talks about how she broke her foot. At times this reads like a diary of events over one year so you are not only hearing about the callers you are reading about the events of Diane's life. There is also a behind-the-scenes look at how counselors actually feel about the callers. I was not surprised that Diane Ackerman also goes looking for one of the callers because she is especially curious.

In the end this book seems to be about compassion and the fragility of human life. If you remember that Diane is as interested in nature as human nature, this book makes more sense. I liked how Diane encouraged the callers to nurture themselves and how she saved lives through intervention. The conversations with the callers are the highlight of the book and you may find yourself skipping through some of the other details to get to more stories about the callers.

~The Rebecca Review

I really wanted to like this book. It's about a subject that interests me -- working on a crisis phone line. And it is written by a renown and respected writer. But I was disappointed.

I have volunteered on a crisis phone line in a university town, and the setting the Ackerman describes is so familiar it's almost like she and I were at the exact same place. I relived my own steps up the stairway up to the phone room, sat on the couch where you could rest while waiting for your shift, perused the log book....

But Ackerman digresses almost constantly, straying far from the subject of the book. In fact, it's hard to say what is the meat of the book and what is a digression. This is intentional, as she believes in following the path of her own imagination. I found it self-indulgent though.

I really wanted a more focused look at the experience of working on a crisis line, how you are touched by others' lives, how difficult it is to help. Instead, she does much meandering about, well, squirrels. Lots of squirrels.