The Book Of Unconformities

(Paperback)

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From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present.

Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life.

Through deeply researched explorations of 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 in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear.

A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.

Reviews

The Book of Unconformities is, in an entirely seductive and moving way, the most genre-bending book I've ever read. I've been unable to stop talking about this book all fall. And I've learned so much. Only Sebald's innovations struck me this wildly. Raffles takes a pair of devastating personal events along with him on an epic tour of the eccentricities and earth-shattering consequences of how and where we live with stone on this planet. I think of Robert Smithson's monumental projects in tandem with this book because this too is a monumental act of mourning, invoking the multitudinous worshipful and destructive things people have done to the only place in the end we truly stand.
--Eileen Myles
"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 . . . [The Book of Unconformities] 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 . . . A poignant and healing descent into deep time and its relevance to the human experience."
--Wall Street Journal
"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." (Starred review)
--Kirkus Reviews
"Among the most mysterious books I've ever read--a dense, dark star . . . What intuition the book requires--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." (New York Times Critics' Pick)--Parul Sehgal "New York Times"

Author Bio

Hugh Raffles is the author of Insectopedia, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Orion Book Award and the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, and of In Amazonia: A Natural History which received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. His essays have appeared in Best American Essays, Granta, Orion, and The New York Times, and he is the recipient of the Whiting Award for nonfiction. He lives in New York City and is professor of anthropology at The New School.