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Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful
Review: 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?
Rating: 
Summary: Moving commentary..
Review: As a hotline listner, I was really excited about reading this book. But boy, what a disappointment! The drama of the job was overshadowed and downplayed by Ms. Akerman's lengthy, banal, and unnecessary observations of a bunch of backyard squirels.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm barely awake,
Review: As a licensed therapist, I expected to be interested by this book. I read hopefully for about 50 pages, then I skimmed pretty well for about another 100 pages. What a irritating bore! The counseling accounts were bearable, although a little boring, but the eternal droning on about the squirrels and birds was more than I could bear. The writing was awkward. It made me want to go to my back yard and quit reading -- which i did. Maybe, if you are interested in counseling this might hold more appeal - but I found it simplistic and sentimental in an irritating way.
Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: An important subject - glanced
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: An important subject - glanced
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The Beauty Continues
Review: In reading A SLENDER THREAD, something amazing happened: my already worshipful esteem for Ms. Ackerman increased dramatically. A fan from the first words of the bestselling A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES, I didn't think it possible for Ms. Ackerman's boundless curiosity and breathtakingly poetic prose to get any better. But in this new book, the metaphors and the subjects they describe are indeed large as life. After donating a laptop computer to her local crisis prevention chapter, Ms. Ackerman is lured into giving a speech to its staff, and ultimately becomes a staff-member herself, as a volunteer answering phones for the suicide prevention hotline. Her oddessey of aiding those in distress is beautifully undertaken and even more beautifully described. At first, the seemingly fearless Ackerman (who has a private pilot's license, scuba dives, is an accomplished horsewoman, and has even sexed crocodiles) is nervous about her abilities at crisis intervention. After the several weeks of training, she still feels apprehensive about responding to callers' crises. But like everything else in the author's incomparable ouevre, life beckons and blazes tantalizingly, and she handles adeptly the callers on the other end of that slender thread. Some people are mired in bogs of depression, others struggling with abusive relationships, while a few are at the brink of suicide. In the stunning climax, Ackerman, from her isolated perch at Suicide Prevention's offices, rescues two desperate souls in a single evening: a teen only seconds from a fatal leap, and a frequent caller whom Ackerman finally realizes from faint clues has already ingested a potentially fatal dose of pills. In reading this late chapter, one's pulse races as frantically as the author's. But in between her shifts, Ackerman celebrates in her typically effervescent way, many of nature's splendors. From weekend bicycle rides around Upstate New York's Finger Lakes region, a two-year study of her backyard squirrels, and a rollicking full moon cross country skiing trek to the strains of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata," among other delightful rituals. Ackerman is an impassioned participant in all of life's rich pageants. (And this sentence, quiet as it is, jolts one out of blind admiration for this intrepid soul: "Some of our counselors, like me, are ones who survived, people who lived to see their lives turn around, and who relish life more because they came so close to losing it.") Yes, a joyous life, but not without its share of troubles. Fortunately, the worst our fiercely talented explorer experiences in these pages are a couple of broken toes. One from a misstep on a neighbor's porch, the other a casualty of her own wheelchair. In A SLENDER THREAD Diane Ackerman has outdone herself. She has turned her poetically tuned naturalist's curiosity to our own fragile species, and composed an elegant song of survival, endurance, and brilliant life
Rating:
Summary: It's about more than you think
Review: Not just an account of Ackerman's volunteer work on a suicide hotline. Like all of her books, it leads to connections and meditations on many subjects. Sit back, relax, and enjoy where this book meanders.
Rating:
Summary: worth a read
Review: Perhaps my interest in psychology, wildlife and science make me a bit biased here, but I adore this book. It is one of those that I will continuously return to. I wasn't planning on reviewing this book, but I was compelled by the one star reviews that complained about Ackerman's backyard observations. Perhaps they missed the "slender thread" (forgive the play on words) but it was about so much more than a few squirrels and birds. It is difficult to explain in words, but the balance between the heartache in the book and Ackerman's personal experiences created an amazing and comforting feeling that I enjoyed each time I picked up the book. I do not recommend this book as a introduction to this author, but those who already love Ackerman's style will delight in it. Her style is very personal and her books often have personal anecdotes and stories which I very much enjoy, but if that sort of thing isn't for you, you may not enjoy this book.
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