From Ackerman (Rarest of the Rare, 1995, etc.) come these graceful,
canny reflections on her hours spent fielding calls at a suicide
prevention center. During "the long corridors of night, when
problems can take on monstrous proportions," Ackerman sits in an
ordinary room taking all-but-ordinary calls. Her phonemates are
people on the raggedy edge, with voices of rising panic, rage,
frustration, distant loneliness, but possessed of a precarious,
tenuous hope that prompts them to telephone. She isn't a therapist,
she isn't there to "[pick] problems apart and [make] sense of their
origins and patterns." She is there to search for equilibrium, to
be a friend for the duration, to examine options, to find windows
and doors in a tunnel. She explores the degree of desperation in a
caller's voice (imminent danger of suicide? a depression that may
slacken?), knowing that "we hope our callers will choose life, but
they have the option and the right to choose death." Nonetheless,
she'll alert the police and call for a phone trace if things spin
out of control. Ackerman's voracious imagination and curiosity find
her making forays into biochemistry and the artistic temperament,
the weather and Walt Whitman, bicycling and skiing, bringing them
all to bear on her shifts at the crisis center. And it is not
surprising that, as a writer of luminous essays on natural history,
she is able to convincingly free-associate between the emotional
geography of animals (a group of squirrels she is studying for a
project) and humans, and compare her telephone work to the
long-distance communication of whales, wolves, and birds. One could
do a lot worse than to find Ackerman at the end of the line when
feeling those desperately slippery moments of despair, the rush
into the unknown. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this intimate and compassionate record of a year's service as a
counselor on a suicide and crisis hotline, the author of "A Natural
History of the Senses" offers fascinating parallels between human
and animal behavior and suggests that crisis is an innate part of
existence.
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