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Acquainted with the Night : Excursions Through the World After Dark
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About Acquainted With The Night : Excursions Through The
Product Description A gorgeously written exploration of the twelve hours of night.We prepare for it each evening, and spend half our lives in its embrace, yet night retains its mysteries. In Acquainted with the Night, author Christopher Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm. Twelve chapters correspond to the twelve hours of an "ideal" night, starting at 6PM and ending at 6AM, and serve as points of departure for night's central themes: sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, fireworks, nightclubs, astronomy, sleep and dreams, the graveyard shift, ladies of the night, the art of night, and endless nights. With boundless curiosity, a lyrical, intimate tone, and an eye for nighttime beauties both natural and manmade, Dewdney paints a captivating portrait of our hours in darkness. From Publishers Weekly Noted Canadian writer Dewdney ( The Immaculate Perception) celebrates the science, religion and art of night in a delightful compendium that charts the nocturnal phases-planetary, human and animal-of life. Dewdney writes confidently about the physics underlying sunset, darkness, lunar phases and the dimensions of night. He explores global culture's nighttime customs and associations found in bedtime stories, festivals, fireworks, sexuality, the gothic imagination, ancient myth and stargazing, among other traditions and practices. He makes several journalistic excursions: studying the work of a pyrotechnical team, accompanying a Toronto constable on night watch and offering himself as a sleep laboratory subject. Through close readings of classic bedtime stories, Dewdney perceptively analyzes childhood's special relation to night, home and security. Yet he also spends time in the adult precincts of nightlife, limning brief histories of cabaret and prostitution before describing the contemporary nightclubbing scene. A fascinating history of street lighting links it to changes in policing methods and attitudes to crime. Night is a tactile realm, Dewdney reminds the reader. Nostalgic for organic purity, he bemoans the lack of true darkness in our overlit modern world. He reports on how light pollution disturbs our circadian rhythms and how sleep deprivation can ruin one's long-term health. Dewdney is careful to thoroughly elucidate the basic neuroscience of the dreaming mind. His summarized history of dream interpretation includes Mesopotamian myth, Vedic lore, Native American and ancient Chinese and Greek theories, as well as Freud and Jung. Tautly written in a highly condensed yet personable voice, this tour of the manifold nocturnal realm is a superbly meticulous feat. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review “Dewdney's capturing of a zone of knowledge is a public event.” ―Books in Canada“A deep thinker with a scrutinizing sense of humor... His writing is like a laser beam; it is clear, brilliant, focused and used as an operational tool.” ―The Toronto Star“Christopher Dewdney is a poet, one of the most remarkable working in Canada now.” ―Saturday Night“Nothing escapes Dewdney's oddly polymath intelligence.” ―The Ottawa Citizen“Dewdney makes me revel in the wonder of life.” ―Eye Magazine About the Author Christopher Dewdney is a poet who has also written extensively about language, culture, and media. The author of three books of nonfiction - Last Flesh, The Secular Grail, and The Immaculate Perception - as well as eleven books of poetry, he is a three-time nominee for Governor General's Awards and a first-prize winner of the CBC Literary Competition. Dewdney lives in Toronto, Ontario, where he is writer in residence at the Glendon Campus of York University.
