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Review by Michael Sims
Diane Ackerman is not predictable. She has written about the evolution of our ideas about sex and love, learning to fly an airplane, endangered animals, and many other topics. A Natural History of the Senses was hugely popular and inspired a five-part PBS television series. Ackerman is also a widely honored poet. In her latest book, A Slender Thread, she unites her familiar turf with a new one. She tells of her experiences talking with callers at a Suicide Prevention and Crisis Counseling Center.
The callers include a manic-depressive diabetic who remains passionate and funny, a woman who works for a service specializing in "escorting" doctors, despairing teenagers, and people who cut or burn themselves because they feel dead unless they are experiencing pain. Readers get to know the callers and the counselors as the author does. Ackerman is driven by fascination as well as by compassion. Her biological training casts us in a different light: "Although I regret our bloodthirsty nature, I'm nevertheless a great fan of humankind. What seems astonishing to me is that, despite our ferocious heritage, we so often act so well. . . . We are resplendent beasts."
A Slender Thread is also a protest on behalf of the less successful, less "well adjusted," the wounded and grieving -- a group that, at times, includes most of us. Ackerman laments the stigma attached to the word "asylum" (a word never to be spoken to callers because of its dark associations) and wonders where we would be without the temporary asylums offered by home, nature, and friendly arms. On the kitchen wall in the crisis center is a poster bearing a roster of distinguished names, including Virginia Woolf, Beethoven, Sylvia Plath, Tolstoy, Vivien Leigh, Michael Faraday. Underneath the names is a banner that reads PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS ENRICH OUR LIVES.
Throughout the book, interwoven with descriptions of her weekly stints at the crisis center, Ackerman explores the natural world around her, intently examining our place in it and its healing presence. "Animals are busy living," she writes. "It's only humans who wander the world like outcasts, feeling lonely much of the time, wondering what they're here for. Part of our sense of isolation and emotional hunger comes from having exiled ourselves from nature." Diane Ackerman refuses to be exiled from either nature or her fellow human beings. She embraces both. Probably that's why so many readers have embraced her.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.