The Book of Unconformities - by Hugh Raffles (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"Drawing on history, anthropology, accounts of exploration, and observation, Hugh Raffles undertakes a journey to places north--to investigate the uncertain survival and unsettling presence of ancient stones and the alluring glimpse that these stones open into lives and meanings now faded from view. He travels to Iceland, to the once standing Odin Stone in the Orkney Islands, to the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides, to the coal mines of Spitsbergen, and to the Museum of Natural History in New York to see the Cape York meteorite that Admiral Peary brought back from Greenland. Raffles also journeys to his own everyday north, on a crowded uptown New York City subway, rattling beneath Broadway, hurtling to a place called Marble Hill--the subterranean marble that soared into peaks, weathered into wooded hills, extruded and folded to form an island that once roamed upon an ancient ocean. Raffles's meditation leads him to understand how these fundamental objects and places can seem to lose their solidity and become inextricable from historic account and the architecture of human fate"--<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><b>From the author of the acclaimed <i>Insectopedia, </i>a powerful exploration of loss, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present</b> <p/> When Hugh Raffles's two sisters died suddenly within a few weeks of each other, he reached for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, as ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own. <p/> A moving, profound, and affirming meditation, <i>The Book of Unconformities </i>is grounded in stories of stones: Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived with six Inuit adventurers in the exuberant but fractious New York City of 1897. <p/> As Raffles follows these fundamental objects, unearthing the events they've engendered, he finds them losing their solidity and becoming as capricious, indifferent, and willful as time itself.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"Among the most mysterious books I've ever read--a dense, dark star . . . Profoundly random . . . What intuition the book requires, what detective work--and what magic tricks it performs. Stones speak, lost time leaves a literal record and, strangest of all, the consolation the writer seeks in the permanence of rocks, in their vast history, he finds instead in their vulnerability, caprice and still-unfolding story."<b> <br>--Parul Sehgal, <i>The New York Times</i></b> <p/>"In a high-voltage jolt of insight, Mr. Raffles converts what might seem a dry scientific concept into a potent literary metaphor to help anyone whose sense of time has been fractured by loss . . . [<i>The Book of Unconformities</i>] is so rich in erudition and prose-poetry that I read it like a glutton, tearing off big bites of lost time until I was sated . . . Vivid . . . Exquisite . . . A poignant and healing descent into deep time and its relevance to the human experience.<br><b>--Robert M. Thorson, <i>Wall Street Journal</i></b> <p/>A spellbinding time travelogue . . . Raffles's dense, associative, essayistic style mirrors geological transformation, compressing and folding chronologies like strata in metamorphic rock . . . Mesmerizing.<br><b>--</b><i><b>Harpers Magazine</b></i> <p/>A work of poetic science, a smashing together of the human and the natural world, of cultures separated by time. Just as a geologic unconformity, this is erudite and artistic.<br><b>--<i>Library Journal</i></b> <p/>Poetic . . . Each section is packed with vivid entertaining tales . . . The text shimmers with rangy curiosity, precise pictorial descriptions, well-narrated history, a sympathetic eye for the natural world, and a deft, light scholarly touch. The mood is as unpredictable as next week's weather, as Raffles remains keenly attuned to the politics and personalities that move the action along. As panoptical and sparking as the crystal contained in many of the author's objects of study.<br><b>--<i>Kirkus Reviews </i>(starred) <p/></b>How much we learn in this exhaustively researched book on the peoples of precolonial Manhattan, Neolithic Hebrides, Greenland, Svarlbard! And of the bedrock upon which they lived, the stones that shot up from the bowels of earth and crashed from outer space, petrified from animals and plants, cut and carved.<br><b>--Alphonso Lingis, author of <i>Dangerous Emotions</i><br></b><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>HUGH RAFFLES</b> is the author of<i> Insectopedia, </i> which was a <i>New York Times</i> Notable Book and received the Orion Book Award and the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and of<i> In Amazonia: A Natural History</i> which received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His essays have appeared in <i>Best American Essays, Granta, Orion</i>, and <i>The New York Times, </i>and he is the recipientof the Whiting Award for nonfiction. He lives in New York City and is professor of anthropology at The New School.
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