This is straightforward, congenial literary criticism, and if it hardly summarizes the field, Ackerman at least stakes out the general perimeter.

The book’s next section is much better, for here Ackerman analyzes specific texts-the ideas about love found in the work of Plato, Stendhal, Proust and Freud, as well as in the legend of Tristan and Isolde. She calls the Dionysian maenads “punks,” says Orpheus’ music gave them “the willies” and characterizes Abelard as a “hunk.” It’s difficult to read such descriptions without wondering the degree to which Ackerman has bent and selected history to suit her storytelling needs. She over-generalizes madly as a result, and although she can be quite interesting when pausing to give detailed discussions of famous lovers such as Cleopatra, Ovid and Abelard, her prose can be informal to the point of flippancy. The biggest problem with this section is that it should be a book unto itself it’s impossible to do justice to 2,000 years of history-Ackerman begins with ancient Egypt and ends in modern times-in a hundred pages. “A Natural History of Love” is divided into six parts, the weakest of which is the first, once-over-lightly chronology of love. Reading the book, you spend half your time wishing it were better, and the other half captivated by those passages in which Ackerman, a poet and staff writer for the New Yorker, has found a particularly good lens through which to view her subject. It is also, however, a reliable crowd-pleaser, meaning that Diane Ackerman’s follow-up to 1990’s best-selling “A Natural History of the Senses” will likely be a staple on beaches around the country this summer.Īnd as it turns out, that’s probably the best way to read “A Natural History of Love,” for it is surprisingly shapeless, a miscellany of vignettes and essays that vary between the arresting and the superficial, the illuminating and the irksome. “Love is the great intangible.” So begins “A Natural History of Love,” and for good reason love is an extremely slippery topic, one certain to resist all attempts at categorization or itemization.

A history of love by diane ackerman