Art
The material included in this mesmerizing set of essays can essentially be broken down into three categories, or themes: Art, Science, and History. Dewdney references many pieces and forms of art from all kinds of time periods in his examination into the nature of the night. The title of this book comes from a poem by Robert Frost called "Acquainted With the Night," and almost every subsection of every chapter has an epigraph that comes from some famous poem or work of literature. Dewdney talks about night and darkness in the context of many different styles of art, including film noir, painting, literature, theatre, and several others. This is perhaps the most encompassing of the three themes, as its influence goes beyond the content of the book: Acquainted With the Night itself is a work of art, and Dewdney puts much thought and artistry into the structure and language of the book.
Science
Much of Acquainted With the Night is also concerned with the scientific explanations for the night and all of its corollaries. Scientific explanations include those for sunsets, nocturnal animals, stars, dreams, insomnia, light pollution, and even night itself. Reference is made to famous scientists and their theories, such as those of Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, Edwin Hubble, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. This book sets out to explain the phenomenon of night, and the scientific explanation is an important foundational one.
History
Dewdney uses the third theme, History, to tie the other two into the larger timeframe of the world's past and present. He spends a considerable amount of time explicating the views of various people and civilizations about night throughout the book, including Greek goddesses, Hindu mysticism, Norse folklore, and popular conceptions from ancient times even through the twenty-first century. The time frame of this book could be said to span from the beginning of time and the universe to the modern era, even up to today. Dewdney's historical perspective is keen, and he uses time as yet another tool in his belt in an attempt to condense the entirety of Night into a single volume.
