Synopses & Reviews
Ackerman is justly celebrated for her unique insight into the natural world and our place in it. In this landmark book, she confronts the unprecedented reality that one prodigiously intelligent and meddlesome creature, , is now the dominant force shaping the future of planet Earth.
Review
"An ode to the planet we've created for ourselves... Rarely grim, and the overwhelming spirit is one of relentless optimism." Nathanial Rich
Review
"[Ackerman] raises the bar for her peers...her penetrating insight is a joy to behold." New York Times
Review
"Ackerman has established herself over the last quarter of a century as one of our most adventurous, charismatic, and engrossing public science writers...she has demonstrated a rare versatility, a contagious curiosity, and a gift for painting quick, memorable tableaus drawn from research across a panoply of disciplines. displays all of these alluring qualities... is a dazzling achievement: immensely readable, lively, polymathic, audacious." Publishers Weekly, Starred review
Review
"Diane Ackerman's vivid writing, inexhaustible stock of insights, and unquenchable optimism have established her as a national treasure, and as one of our great authors. You're now about to become addicted to Diane Ackerman." Rob Nixon New York Times Book Review
Review
"In this amazingly illuminating book, Diane Ackerman explains our future with her typically intoxicating blend of scholarship, wisdom, grace and humor." Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and The World Until Yesterday
Review
" allows us to consider whether or not we will accept destruction or restoration as our legacy. I cannot imagine a richer text of image and insight, rendered with grace, intelligence and stamina." Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies
Review
"With this stirringly vivid, darkbright manifesto, Diane Ackerman summons us to the wager of sheer possibility: life against death, delight still (if only just barely) trouncing despair." Terry Tempest Williams, author of When Women Were Birds
Review
"A book to dip around in--skimming some parts and perusing others with care--as your interest guides you, enjoying Ackerman's profound sense of mind play as you go." Lawrence Weschler, author of Everything that Rises, Pulitzer Prize finalist
Review
"A hard look at the impact that humans have had on Earth... thought provoking." Ben Dickinson Elle
Review
"Fascinating... Ackerman offers a cross-cultural tour of human ingenuity ... Her words invite us to feel the hope she feels." Kyle Anderson Entertainment Weekly
Review
"Part immersion memoir and part journalism... is also many parts poetry." Barbara J. King Washington Post
Review
"[A] thought-provoking analysis of our connection to the earth... A lens that magnifies and clarifies the fascinating, far-reaching effects humans have had on our planet and ourselves." Beth Kephart Chicago Tribune
Review
"Ackerman is a gorgeous writer and perceptive observer. Here she writes with great empathy about the human plight." Lee E. Cart Shelf Awareness
Review
"A humdinger of a book... Ackerman is optimistic, even exhilarated, and frequently giddy about the future of humanity." Kate Tuttle Boston Globe
Review
"Exquisite and startling." Jon Christensen San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
Humans have "subdued 75 percent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness." We tinker with nature at every opportunity; we garden the planet with our preferred species of plants and animals, many of them invasive; and we have even altered the climate, threatening our own extinction. Yet we reckon with our own destructive capabilities in extraordinary acts of hope-filled creativity: we collect the DNA of vanishing species in a "frozen ark," equip orangutans with iPads, and create wearable technologies and synthetic species that might one day outsmart us. With her distinctive gift for making scientific discovery intelligible to the layperson, Ackerman takes us on an exhilarating journey through our new reality, introducing us to many of the people and ideas now creating perhaps saving our future and that of our fellow creatures.
A beguiling, optimistic engagement with the changes affecting every part of our lives, The Human Age is a wise and beautiful book that will astound, delight, and inform intelligent life for a long time to come.
"
Synopsis
With her celebrated blend of scientific insight, clarity, and curiosity, Diane Ackerman explores our human capacity both for destruction and for invention as we shape the future of the planet Earth. Ackerman takes us to the mind-expanding frontiers of science, exploring the fact that the "natural" and the "human" now inescapably depend on one another, drawing from "fields as diverse as evolutionary robotics...nanotechnology, 3-D printing and biomimicry" (New York Times Book Review), with probing intelligence, a clear eye, and an ever-hopeful heart.
Synopsis
A dazzling, inspiring tour through the ways that humans are working with nature to try to save the planet.
About the Author
Diane Ackerman has been the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in addition to many other awards and recognitions for her work, which include the best-selling The Zookeeper's Wife and A Natural History of the Senses. She lives with her husband Paul West in Ithaca, New York.