Book summary

Diane Ackerman is a fiction writer, a poet, and a naturalist, and she lets all these talents shine in her gorgeous ode to that magical time of day, the dawn. She draws on her own observations, on myths, on science, and on the often-invisible lives of animals (with particularly fine attention to the avian world) to create a book that is both reverent and deeply personal, a book that opens your eyes to everyday miracles with the same intensity of focus as Annie Dillard's PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK.

Media reviews

"It's easy to live in the moment when you're immersed in Ackerman's glorious prose, studded with arresting phrases and breathtakingly beautiful images....[T]he impressions that linger after closing her book are not of suffering but of joy, not of change, but of the flow of incident halted, over and over, by the masterful hand of an artist who sketches with tender words the small miracles of a vast universe."