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: Akerman should have called this one "A Slender Squirel"
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: 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: Moving commentary..
Review: by a masterful wordsmith with moving passages about crisis line, life, squirrels, etc.
Rating:
Summary: Empowering and encouraging
Review: I am reading this book for the second time as I'm currently in a training program for potential crisis counselor volunteers. With the very small amount of exposure I've had to what being a crisis counselor is like, I do think that Ackerman's portrayal is very accurate. I can certainly understand her frustrations over not being able to fix her callers' problems and her intense curiosity about what her callers are like in person. The book is beautifully written and, while I like the juxtaposition of her life as a naturalist with her life as a crisis counselor, I must admit I do find myself skipping over the chapters devoted to squirrels and birds in order to get to the "good stuff." All in all, "A Slender Thread" is an account of human crises that leaves the reader with hope rather than despair.
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.
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