Event

DIANE ACKERMAN -- KPFA and Berkeley Arts & Letters

Wednesday, September 30

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

In an eye-opening sequence of personal mediations through the cycle of seasons, the wonderful storyteller-poet-naturalist 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 considers 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 sciences devotion to detail with religions 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.

Diane Ackerman is the author of A Natural History of the Senses and many others books, most recently The Zookeepers Daughter. Visit her at dianeackerman.com.

7:30 PM
KPFA and Berkeley Arts & Letters @ The Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley
 $10 advance/$13 door