Nautilus

The Last Word with Diane Ackerman

For three decades Diane Ackerman has brought us as close to nature as we can get through words. Her books are not a field guide to the natural world, they are an embodiment of it. As she showed with, among others, A Natural History of the Senses and The Zookeeper’s, about Polish zookeepers who saved hundreds of people during World War II, she is less an observer from the outside than a voice from the inside. You don’t read her books as much as live them.

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