Diane Ackerman's Deep Play

Deep Play

Random House, $23.95 hard

Diane Ackerman's perspective is a gift. More than any other writer of whom I am aware, her passions bubble up through her sincere words, bursting against her readers, infecting them with her love of life. A former pilot, avid bicyclist, eager space-enthusiast, poignant poet, reverent naturalist, and student of both science and the humanities, she's best known for her acclaimed A Natural History of the Senses.

Her latest book, Deep Play, is a sometimes lyrical, sometimes overly academic account of the phenomenon called deep play, a state of transcendence in which the mind is transported to a state of rapture or ecstasy. It can come from something intense like climbing Mount Everest to something like losing yourself in a pretty bike ride. It can come from physical exertion, intense camaraderie, or a feeling of oneness with nature. Some people seek it out; others are afraid of the loss of control that comes along with it.

It's a subject that Ackerman, a rapt and eloquent student of the world, is clearly an expert of: As a poet, prose-writer, and documentarian of scientific phenomena, she has a childlike sense of wonder about almost everything and nature, and a poet's gift for expressing it. An articulate penguin-watcher, she begins the book with an account of a trip to Antarctica to see some emperors: "They stood doll-like, their legs set close to their tails; they were upright by design, growing large and burly enough to dive deep through frigid waters to feast on squid. Letting my mind spin on into caricature, I fancied them monarchs of all they surveyed, riding ice-floe coaches, and wearing a royal purple that came, not from sea snails, but from the atmosphere itself, when the cloak of night descended over them."

To top it all off, Ackerman knows everything. Everything. The book, which touches on the history of deep play as pursued through movement (bicycles, horses, space travel) is obviously well-researched, but the way she weaves together stories about cognates and cultural anthropology and anecdotal experience and science is unfathomable; it's hard to fathom how she knew to research what she did.

Ironically, the book itself, with its fun tone yet scholastic backbone, drags in parts -- it is almost the antithesis of deep play. But much of the prose is so intensely lovely that the reader will bear her need, overbearing in the beginning, to prove a point about deep play. One of the problems is the book's organization. Deep Play touches on many interesting subjects in a linear fashion, but how they all relate to the concept of deep play can get lost. The other awkwardness is that since no synonym exists for the phrase "deep play," some of the text becomes monotonous, though her descriptions are spun together with skill and wonder, and her perspective is right-on.