Лучшие книги Дианы Акерман

В романе «Жена смотрителя зоопарка» Диана Акерман с блеском, юмором и бесконечным сочувствием к своим героям воплотила подлинную историю войны и величия человеческого духа. В ней рассказывается о героической чете Жабинских, владельцах Варшавского зоопарка, которые во время Второй мировой войны прятали в разоренных вольерах людей из еврейского гетто и таким образом…

«Большинство склонно считать, что разум находится в голове. Но новейшие открытия физиологов говорят о том, что на самом деле он не сосредоточен полностью в мозге, а странствует по всему телу с караванами гормонов и ферментов, трудолюбиво осмысляя весь тот сплав чудес, которые мы привыкли называть “осязанием”, “вкусом”, “обонянием”, “слухом” и “зрением”. В этой книге…

Рассказывая о том, как менялись представления о любви в истории, соединяя пунктиром эпохи Древнего Египта, Древней Греции и Древнего Рима, Средневековье, эпоху Возрождения и современность, американский публицист и поэт Диана Акерман приглашает нас постичь «великое непостижимое» – любовь во всем многообразии ее аспектов. Изысканно написанная и основанная на…

Люди "освоили 75% поверхности суши, создали множество поистине чудесных промышленных и медицинских изобретений, осветили всю планету". Природа для нас - не храм, а мастерская, мы населили биосферу нашими любимыми видами растений и животных, многие из которых являются инвазионными; мы даже изменили климат, поставив под угрозу наше собственное существование. Однако мы…

Эта книга - о большой любви к словам и жизни. Ее написала поэтесса и писательница Диана Акерман о своем муже, известном романисте Поле Уэсте. В 2005 году Уэста поразил инсульт, и за несколько секунд он потерял весь свой богатейший словарный запас. Очнувшись, писатель мог произнести только одно слово - "мем". По мнению врачей, Уэст был обречен на безмолвие, но…

Diane Ackerman's lusciously written grand tour of the realm of the senses includes conversations with an iceberg in Antarctica and a professional nose in New York, along with dissertations on kisses and tattoos, sadistic cuisine and the music played by the planet Earth.

“Delightful . . . gives the reader the richest possible feeling of the worlds the senses take in.” —The New York Times

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.

In her first new book of poetry since Jaguar of Sweet Laughter, poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman combines her deep understanding of the world with her immense passion for language to craft richly sensual poems that "honor all life/wherever and in whatever form/it may deal."

Imbued with ravishing imagery, these exuberant and lyrical explorations of aging, longing, and death demonstrate Ackerman's full engagement with every aspect of life's process. Ackerman muses on the confines of therapy sessions, where she intersects "twice a week/in a painstaking hide-and-seek/making do with half-light, half-speak"; relishes the succulent pleasure of eating an apricot, with its "gush of taboo sweetness"; and imagines the "unupholstered voice, a life in outline" in her stunning elegy to C. S. Lewis. Whimsical, organic, and wise, the poems in I Praise My Destroyer affirm Ackerman's place as one of the most enchanting poets writing today.

Culled from love letters, poetry, fiction, personal essays, and memoirs, this lavish and fascinating anthology celebrates humankind's grandest pastime and obsession: love.
How do we define love? "It feels like hunger pains, and we use the same word. Pang. Perhaps this is why Cupid is depicted with a quiver of arrows, because love feels at times like being pierced in the chest. It is a wholesome violence. . . . People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets." So writes Diane Ackerman in her insightful introduction.

Here is a panorama of fine writing about love's many moods and majesties, from all the veils of flirtation, seduction, and marriage to the tempests of suspicion, jealousy, and heartache. Here is a treasury of more than two hundred selections from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?" There are excerpts from Romeo and Juliet, Madame Bovary, Justine, The Odyssey, Lady Chatterley's Lover, as well as the letters from Baudelaire to Sabatier, George Eliot to Herbert Spencer, and Henry Miller to Anais Nin.

General readers and scholars alike will delight in this anthology's mix of the contemporary and the classic.

In A Natural History of the Senses Diane Ackerman revealed herself as a naturalist who writes with the sensuous immediately of a great poet. Now Jaguar of Sweet Laughter presents the work of a poet with the precise and wondering eye of a gifted naturalist.

Ackermans's Olympian vision records and transforms landscapes from Amazonia to Antarctica, while her imaginative empathy penetrates the otherness of hummingbirds, deer, and trilobites. But even as they draw readers into the wild heart of nature, Ackerman's poems are indelible reminders of what it is to be a human being -- the "jaguar of sweet laughter" that, according to Mayan mythology, astonished the world because it was the first animal to speak.