In the mode of her esteemed bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman's new book, Cultivating Delight celebrates the sensory pleasures she discovers in her garden.
Ackerman delights in her garden through all the seasons. Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers. She chronicles instances of violence in nature but also intuits loneliness and desire in the clamor of male crickets in the spring. And there is wonderment and marvel as she happens upon a tiny frog asleep inside the petals of a tulip. Visitors to her garden range from botanical explorers of earlier centuries to the nature mystic John Muir to the brilliant British garden writer Gertrude Jekyll.
The author's garden nourishes its creator, who imaginatively returns the favor and seizes privileged moments to leap from science and metaphor to meditation on the human condition. Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take in it.

Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Ackerman, Diane

Gardening & Landscape Design

Harper

The author of twenty celebrated books of poetry and nonfiction, Diane Ackerman offers a new collection of masterfully crafted poems with an unusual focus.
At the heart of Origami Bridges is the delicate relationship of trust between analyst and patient, a relationship that grows out of the emotional give-and-take of the psychoanalytic process. In this collection, Diane Ackerman, with astonishing candor, lays bare her desires, anger, jealousy, fears, and anxiety as she probes not only her psychic landscape but also her past. And what gradually rises to the surface is an understanding of how the poet uses verse to purge her demons, express her delight, or confess secret longing, and through this process come to a better understanding of the self.
Ackerman's energy and passion are everywhere in evidence, and "she makes the task of putting words to the wordless seem effortless" [Manchester Journal]. Exuberant, lyrical, these are deeply felt poems about life and one of its most important relationships. This collection is Diane Ackerman at the height of her powers as a poet.

Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

In the mode of her bestseller A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman celebrates the sensory pleasures of her garden through the seasons. Whether she is deadheading flowers or glorying in the profusion of roses, offering sugar water to a hummingbird or studying the slug, she welcomes the unexpected drama and extravagance as well as the sanctuary her garden offers.
Written in sensuous, lyrical prose, Cultivating Delight is a hymn to nature and to the pleasure we take in it.

Harper-perennial

At the heart of Origami Bridges is the delicate relationship of trust between analyst and patient, a relationship that grows out of the emotional give-and-take of the psychoanalytic process. In this collection, Diane Ackerman, with astonishing candor, lays bare her desires, anger, jealousy, fears, and anxiety, as she probes not only her present emotional landscape but also her past. And what gradually rises to the surface is an understanding of how the poet uses verse to purge her demons, express her delight, or confess secret longing, and through this process come to a better understanding of the self.

A stapler with its tiny fangs Cannot outwit orangutangs. Rocks are very good at sitting, but never walk or take up knitting. Living things all feel and sense their way through every happenstance. . . . In this delightfully witty collection of poems, bestselling author Diane Ackerman shows how the senses shape and enrich the experiences of all living beings. With enchanting illustrations by Peter Sís, Animal Sense is sure to capture the imagination of readers young and old.

Animal Sense

Children's Books

Animals

Knopf Books for Young Readers

A stapler with its tiny fangs Cannot outwit orangutangs. Rocks are very good at sitting, but never walk or take up knitting. Living things all feel and sense their way through every happenstance. . . . In this delightfully witty collection of poems, bestselling author Diane Ackerman shows how the senses shape and enrich the experiences of all living beings. With enchanting illustrations by Peter Sís, Animal Sense is sure to capture the imagination of readers young and old. From the Hardcover edition.

The New York Times bestseller soon to be a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain. A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw―and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the Zabinskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants―otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes.With her exuberant prose and exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman engages us viscerally in the lives of the zoo animals, their keepers, and their hidden visitors. She shows us how Antonina refused to give in to the penetrating fear of discovery, keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her. 8 pages of illustrations

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

History

Europe

W.W.Norton&Company

A celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalist explores a year of dawns in her most personal book to date. In an eye-opening sequence of personal meditations through the cycle of seasons, Diane Ackerman awakens us to the world at dawn―drawing on sources as diverse as meteorology, world religion, etymology, art history, poetry, organic farming, and beekeeping. As a patient and learned observer of animal and human physiology and behavior, she introduces us to varieties of bird music and other signs of avian intelligence, while she herself “migrates” from winter in Florida to spring, summer, and fall in upstate New York. Humans might luxuriate in the idea of being “in” nature, Ackerman points out, but we often forget that we are nature―for “no facet of nature is as unlikely as we, the tiny bipeds with the giant dreams.” Joining science’s devotion to detail with religion’s appreciation of the sublime, Dawn Light is an impassioned celebration of the miracles of evolution―especially human consciousness of our numbered days on a turning earth. 8 pages of color

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

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for the National Book Circle Critics Award "Diane Ackerman's most enjoyable, intimate, and heartrending work yet."―Atul Gawande Everyone who cherishes the gift of language will cherish Diane Ackerman's narrative masterpiece, an exquisitely written love story and medical miracle story, one that combines science, inspiration, wisdom, and heart. One day Ackerman's husband, Paul West, an exceptionally gifted wordsmith and intellectual, suffered a terrible stroke. When he regained awareness he was afflicted with aphasia―loss of language―and could utter only a single syllable: "mem." The standard therapies yielded little result but frustration. Diane soon found, however, that by harnessing their deep knowledge of each other and her scientific understanding of language and the brain she could guide Paul back to the world of words. This triumphant book is both a humane and revealing addition to the medical literature on stroke and aphasia and an exquisitely written love story: a magnificent addition to literature, period.

One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

As Diane Ackerman writes in her brilliant new book, The Human Age, "our relationship with nature has changed…radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable." Ackerman is justly celebrated for her unique insight into the natural world and our place in it. In this landmark book, she confronts the unprecedented reality that one prodigiously intelligent and meddlesome creature, Homo sapiens, is now the dominant force shaping the future of planet Earth. Humans have "subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness." We tinker with nature at every opportunity; we garden the planet with our preferred species of plants and animals, many of them invasive; and we have even altered the climate, threatening our own extinction. Yet we reckon with our own destructive capabilities in extraordinary acts of hope-filled creativity: we collect the DNA of vanishing species in a "frozen ark," equip orangutans with iPads, and create wearable technologies and synthetic species that might one day outsmart us. With her distinctive gift for making scientific discovery intelligible to the layperson, Ackerman takes us on an exhilarating journey through our new reality, introducing us to many of the people and ideas now creating―perhaps saving―our future and that of our fellow creatures.
A beguiling, optimistic engagement with the changes affecting every part of our lives, The Human Age is a wise and beautiful book that will astound, delight, and inform intelligent life for a long time to come.

The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ackerman, Diane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ackerman, Diane

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ackerman, Diane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire

Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden

Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire

Animal Sense

Animal Sense

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

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

One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, a Marriage, and the Language of Healing

The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us