Diane Ackerman has generally turned her unusual sensitivity to consideration of the natural world and the human experience of it. In A Slender Thread, she journeys down a vastly different road, describing her involvement with a telephone crisis center in the college town where she lives. The callers want her to talk them out of suicide, and their fear and sadness is a weight she at first has trouble bearing gracefully. Ackerman explores human despair as she would a magnificent cavern, always moving toward the light of understanding.