Diane Ackerman

from the dust-jacket:

In an eye-opening sequence of personal meditations through the cycle of seasons, celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalist Diane Ackerman awakens us to the world at dawn, bringing into stunning focus a time of day that many of us literally or metaphorically sleep through. Drawing on sources as diverse as meteorology, world religion, etymology, art history, poetry, organic farming, and beekeeping, Ackerman explores dawn’s every aspect from bird and animal behavior, to the incomparable morning light that has long inspired artists such as Monet, to dawn rituals the world over, to the many connotations of the word “dawn.”

As she migrates like the birds she observes from winter in Florida to spring, summer, and fall in upstate New York, Ackerman revels—with contagious passion and delight--in that moment in which the deepest arcades of life and matter become visible. Dawn Light is a series of “secular hallelujahs,” and also Ackerman’s most personal book to date, as autumn cattails evoke memories of her mother and an achy knee in the morning prompts reflection on the body as a “bone house.”

Humans might luxuriate in the idea of being “in” nature, Ackerman points out, but often forget that we are nature—for “no facet of nature is as unlikely as we, the tiny bipeds with the giant dreams.” In prose so rich and evocative that one can feel the earth turning beneath one’s feet as one reads, Ackerman’s thrilling observations—of things ranging from cloud glories to the endangered whooping cranes of the book’s title—urge us to live in the moment, to wake up to nature’s everyday miracles.

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