Customer Rating: 
Summary: Excellent writing and interesting read
Comment: Ackerman clearly loves and knows how to use words...her very specific descriptions of nature are complemented by her overview of the process of "hot line" management and intervention. Sometimes it's difficult to tell which is her priority. But that's not a negative...she operates in the land of NOW, and reminds us all to do the same. I am recommending, and purchasing, for others.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Fragility of Human Life
Comment: 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
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Comment: 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?
Customer Rating:
Summary: An important subject - glanced
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing
Comment: As a therapist in a mental hospital and a volunteer for a crisis line, I was very interested in this book for Ackerman's insights into working with persons in crisis over the telephone. While I did appreciate her healthy and Zen-like perspective on life and the natural world, I felt she really didn't address much about the crisis work at all. Instead, most of this book consists of ramblings about unrelated aspects of nature and shameless self-promotion of her other literary and artistic efforts.To illustrate my point, I present a breakdown of a typical chapter in the book; of 22 pages, 3 pages were dedicated to thoughts about being an artist, 2 pages to women's roles, 4 pages to her ordeals when she broke her foot, 1 page about zoos, 1 page about food, 4 pages about solar eclipses, 1 page about the word "asylum", 4 pages about squirrels, and a whopping 2 pages about a crisis call.
I agree with other reviewers that her writing stlye is also very awkward, with some sentences running on for entire pages and rarely coming to any points. While this book isn't entirely bad, I felt it was a disappointing effort at addressing the dynamics of individuals on both sides of a crisis telephone line, which is how it is promoted.
