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

Diane Ackerman is the acclaimed author of A Natural History of the Senses, the bestselling The Zookeeper's Wife, Dawn Light, One Hundred Names for Love, and many other books. She lives in Ithaca, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida.

A celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalist explores a year of dawns in her most personal book to date.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Short of all those thanatosomniphobiacs out there -- the folks who fear dying in their sleep -- few hail the dawn with as much gratitude as Diane Ackerman. In the gathering light, her senses are alert and receptive to a parade of glories: mind-bending colors in the sky, the smell of a lover s skin, the ruckus of birdsong, the morning glory itself -- not the flower (though that too), but a meteorological event: long rolling clouds, rushing forward while spinning backward, a nursery for thunderstorms and awe. She is also happy to have made it through another patch of dangerous darkness, and we nod in agreement, remembering how vulnerable we feel, how our skin crawls, when night is truly pitch black. Our reptilian core has not surrendered its dread of night, even in these light-polluted times. "It s as survivors that we greet each day," she writes in this collection of luxurious, whither-where-I-wander meditations on the break of day. Then again, dawn is the time of duels and the clash of armies, when predators do their best work. Beauty, danger, sensuality -- just Ackerman s cup of tea.

Prologue: A Dawning Pleasure

Dawn Mother 1

Spring: Palm Beach, Florida

Dawn Among the Palms 9

Just a Little Rain 17

A Calamity of Cranes 21

The Lost Night Sky 30

Forget Bats 34

Some Tales We Tell 40

Venus Observed 45

In the Spirit of Monet 49

Festivals of the Dawn 56

Troubadours 63

Missive 71

Red Dawns and Fields of Green 76

Time Races Dawn's Many Faces 83

Summer: Ithaca, New York

Dangerous Dawn 95

In the Spirit of Sei Shonagon 99

Dawn in the Garden of Cosmic Reflection 107

Matins with the Neighbors (Two-Legged and Four) 113

The Solstice Bird 120

In the Spirit of Hokusai 124

On the Ledge of the Morning 128

Dew Drop In 132

Where It's Summer 140

Woodpecker Dawn 144

Glory Days 148

Autumn

The Murmuring of Innumerable Bees 155

Honeycombing 159

An Angle on Archimedes 164

A Little Sabbath with the Sun 168

Autumn Dawn 171

False Dawn 174

Nothing Doing 176

In the Vase of the Universe 180

Clever as Clever 188

Field Guides 195

Winter

Where It's Winter 203

Water, Water Everywhere 209

Crystals 215

One Bad Rooster Spoils the Barnyard 219

After Hours 225

The Silence That Is Not There and the Silence That Is 232

Time Well Spent 236

Acknowledgments 241