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Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | LP 616.81062 ACK | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"Diane Ackerman's most enjoyable, intimate, and heartrending work yet."-Atul Gawande
Author Notes
Diane Ackerman was born on October 7, 1948 in Waukegan, Illinois. She received a B.A. in English from Pennsylvania State University and her M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. in English from Cornell University. Poet, author, educator, adventurer, and naturalist, she tries to bridge science and art in her writing, exploring questions of who we are, where we come from, and how we fit into the fabric of the world.
She has written many books of poetry including The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral; Wife of Light; Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems; Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire; and I Praise My Destroyer. Her nonfiction works include A Natural History of the Senses; A Natural History of Love; The Moon by Whale Light: And Other Adventures Among Bats, Crocodilians, Penguins, and Whales; An Alchemy of Mind; and On Extended Wings. She also writes nature books for children including Animal Sense; Monk Seal Hideaway; and Bats: Shadows in the Night. She is coeditor of a Norton anthology, The Book of Love. Her essays about nature and human nature have appeared in Parade, National Geographic, The New York Times, and The New Yorker magazines. She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by A Natural History of the Senses.
She received the Orion Book Award for The Zookeepers Wife. Her other awards include the Abbie Copps Poetry Prize, Black Warrior Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize, Peter I. B. Lavan award, and the Wordsmith award. She has taught at a variety of universities, including Columbia and Cornell.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
A writer helps her husband recover the ability to use words through declarations of affection. DIANE ACKERMAN and Paul West have combined brilliant literary careers with the most enviable of marriages, a "decades-long duet" Speculating on their longevity as a couple in "One Hundred Names for Love," Ackerman writes: "We stayed together for the children - each was the other's child. And we were both wordsmiths, cuddle-mad, and extremely playful. ... All couples play kissy games they don't want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don't marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we're creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they're wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words." As a young man, West had been an R.A.F. officer and a collegiate and county cricketer, and had graduated with a first from Oxford, something achieved through impressive feats of scholarship or by sheer dazzle - he managed both. A novelist by the time he and Ackerman fell in love in the early 1970s, he "had a draper's touch for the unfolding fabric of a sentence, and he collected words like rare buttons," Ackerman writes. Indeed, words were the oxygen of their love. Every morning, she knew she'd "find a little hand-scrawled love note awaiting me, a gung-ho welcome to the world again after a nighttime away. . . . A new note appeared almost every day for decades." Thus it was particularly tragic when, in 2003, West suffered a stroke that left him with global aphasia: an inability to produce words or to understand words spoken to him. "He had chosen to live the proverbial 'life of the mind' to the exclusion of all else, reserving his energy for writing and for his equally word-passionate wife," Ackerman writes. "Taking words from Paul was like emptying his toy chest, rendering him a deadbeat, switching his identity, severing his umbilical to loved ones and stealing his manna." His new vocabulary consisted of only one word, a meaningless syllable that he repeated, raising the volume when he was frustrated: "MEM, MEM, MEM. . . ." Ackerman is an unwavering presence at her husband's side. As a naturalist, she produces observations that make this book so much more than a pathography, or a narrative of illness: "In the avian world, it sometimes happens that two fine-feathered mates duet to produce a characteristic song, with each singing their part so seamlessly that it's easy to confuse the melody as the work of only one bird. If one dies, the song splinters and ends. Then, quite often, the mournful other bird begins singing both parts to keep the whole song alive. Without realizing it, I found myself taking over Paul's old role of house song sparrow and began making up silly ditties to share." West's every utterance becomes an exhausting guessing game. Years later, after he has recovered the ability to speak and write - though "aphasia still plagues him with its merry dances, . . . its occasionally missed adverbs and verbs, its automatically repeated words or phrases," Ackerman explains - he is able to describe his own efforts. "On rare occasions," he tells his wife, "the word I sought lay like an angel, begging to be used, even if only to be used in spirit ditties of no tone. I had the beginnings of a word, . . . maybe miles away, maybe too far for customary use, and it would remain, a delusive harbinger of night, a word unborn, doomed to remain unsaid as humm - or thai - unable to complete itself because of my aphasie ineptitude." A speech therapist working with West at home points to a picture of an angel, and West says "cherubim," which the therapist thinks is a nonsense word. Ackerman corrects her, then decides to devise her own exercises "tailored to his lifelong strengths, words and creativity, exercises with a little fun, a little flair, and not condescending." She realizes, too, that he has a great desire to write again, and she helps him at first by taking dictation - a hugely difficult task. Eventually, as he gradually improves, he begins to write on his own. Why would West want to write when he is already expending huge energy trying to convey the simplest of desires? "Because of the huge gap between what he could say and what he could think," Ackerman recalls. "Ideas inched through his speech, but they whipped around his thoughts like ice yachts." Or as she quotes West explaining it: "The contrast reassured me as to what lay ahead. It was merely a matter of lining up the two in sync, making a match between my pall-mall thought and aphasia. Would it take six months or a year, or never happen at all? This was the great unknown of my life." As in her previous work - "A Natural History of Love" and "A Natural History of the Senses" being my favorites - here, Ackerman weds exquisite writing with profound insights, this time into speech and imagination: "Creativity is an intellectual adventure into those jungles where the jaguars of sweet laughter croon, with a willingness to double back, ignore fences or switch directions at the drop of a coconut." The book's title stems from the fact that "once upon a time, in the Land of Before, Paul had so many pet names for me I was a one-woman zoo." The stroke has left him struggling to say his wife's name. When a friend asks him, "Do you have a pet name for Diane?" his face falls "as if touched by a Taser," Ackerman writes. "'Used to have ... hundreds,' he said with infinite sadness. 'Now I can't think of one.'" Ackerman begins teaching him the names again, beginning with the simplest, "swan, pilot-poet," and he recognizes them. She coaxes him to invent new ones, a morning ritual, and slowly "names arrived, spoken as we snuggled in bed, such marvels as 'Little Moonskipper of the Tumbleweed Factory.'" An appendix lists the One Hundred Names, which Ackerman notes "continue to flow and flower, some funny, some romantic, some playfully outlandish - all a testament to how a brain can repair itself, and how a duet between two lovers can endure hardship. This is what we have made of a diminished thing. A bell with a crack in it may not ring as clearly, but it can ring as sweetly." I will confess I was deeply affected by "One Hundred Names for Love." Ackerman and West's is an extraordinary love story, and that a devastating stroke intervened has made it only more moving. Since we are all mortal, none of us will experience love without also experiencing loss. This book has done what no other has for me in recent years: it has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love, the need to give and get it unstintingly, to hold nothing back, settle for nothing less, because when flesh and being and even life fall away, love endures. This book is proof. Paul West and Diane Ackerman bonded over a passion for language. Words were the oxygen of their love. Abraham Verghese is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the author of the novel "Cutting for Stone."