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

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Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Wendy Smith Diane Ackerman wants us to slow down and pay attention. Human beings are "creatures stricken by meaning, afflicted with purpose," she laments; that's why it's essential to stop and savor those instants when "time suddenly snags on a simple Wow!" It's easy to live in the moment when you're immersed in Ackerman's glorious prose, studded with arresting phrases and breathtakingly beautiful images. A prizewinning poet, she also lavishes her lyrical gifts on books about science, nature and history, such as her 2007 bestseller, "The Zookeeper's Wife." She chose dawn as the subject of her new book because, she writes in the prologue, it's the beginning of the day, "a fresh start" with cleansed vision before "familiar routines and worries charge in." Moving across the seasons from spring dawns in Palm Beach, Fla., through winter sunrises in Ithaca, N.Y., her book abounds in sensuous snapshots -- dawn "wells up, as if the ground were oozing light," or can be seen "percolating among the vegetables" -- as the author flies through a plethora of subjects. Seizing the day does not, apparently, require staying in one place. Thinking of Aurora, goddess of the dawn, leads Ackerman to consider the respective merits of metaphor and science. The planet Venus, she notes, was called "deer of the dawn" in Hebrew, while Roman astronomers dubbed it Lucifer (light-bearing), a name the Bible transferred to a fallen angel, "son of the morning." A glimpse of a baby rabbit at sunrise reminds the author that Eostri, the Celtic goddess of dawn and source of the words East and Easter, was always accompanied by a rabbit; "as Christianity borrowed from the old pagan religions, the goddess Easter became the holiday, complete with benign Easter rabbits." Ackerman roams far afield, and sometimes the links to her ostensible subject are strained, albeit delightful: A glimpse of starlings flocking at dawn segues into a visit with a friend's hilarious talking bird; the morning light catches a sycamore tree shedding bark in "parchment scrolls reminding me of Archimedes' lost journals." She always returns, however, to her central preoccupation, the need to pause amid life's hurly-burly forward motion and quietly appreciate where we are right now. In some of the book's loveliest passages, she points to Claude Monet as the painter of this magical space. "Let me show you the transient beauty of absolutely any moment," the author imagines Monet saying, words that she could easily have uttered herself. Like Monet, she aims "to capture the intimate drama of seeing something for the first time," and she makes the familiar strange when she describes rain boots as "sap from rubber trees attached to the feet," or reminds us of the oddly varied meanings of the word "wake" (emerging from sleep, a party for the dead, the trail behind a moving ship), all of which "meet in a past nearly beyond imagining, in the Old Norse word vaka, 'an opening in the ice.' " Highly charged prose like this runs the risk of overstatement, and Ackerman doesn't always avoid it ("birdsong doesn't lie," "it's only in death that we're fully sensual"). We forgive her these lapses; they're much less frequent than sections that employ the precision of a naturalist and scientist to convey the wonder of a poet. We learn about the structure of crystals and the composition of rust as she meditates on harmony, decay and serenity. Rhapsodic effusions that might otherwise seem facile gain depth from a somber undercurrent of loss, pain and mortality. The 60-year-old author mentions in passing her pinched neck nerves, bad knee and several brushes with death; she dreams of her dead mother and pulls us up short with an unelaborated reference to "the looming death of a spouse." Ackerman accepts these sorrows as woven into the fabric of existence. "I love being part of the saga of life on earth," she writes, "and both suffering and change feature large in that adventure." Yet the impressions that linger after closing her book are not of suffering but of joy, not of change, but of the flow of incident halted, over and over, by the masterful hand of an artist who sketches with tender words the small miracles of a vast universe. "Just show up," she urges us. "Presence is always a present, a gift." Her gift to us is the sheer pleasure of seeing the world through her loving eyes.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review

Starred Review. These pieces are accessible and lyrically written, and they flow well, one after another, making reading the book a true pleasure. Ackerman's fans and readers who appreciate nature writing at its finest will love this. (Library Journal )

[Y]ou're immersed in Ackerman's glorious prose, studded with arresting phrases and breathtakingly beautiful images....Her gift to us is the sheer pleasure of seeing the world through her loving eyes. (Wendy Smith - Washington Post )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393061736
• ISBN-13: 978-0393061734
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #109,960 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'd Give This Book an Extra Star if I Could, October 21, 2009

By	Stephanie DePue (Carolina Beach, NC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"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 Fahrenheit out. I'd give the writer an extra star for this book if I could, but, unfortunately, five's the limit.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dawn Light, October 14, 2009

By	Sue B. Detisch (San Diego, California, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very pleasant reading experience, December 30, 2009

By	Florence M. Laprath (Eveleth, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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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.