The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time

Raffles, Hugh

ISBN 10: 0804197997 / ISBN 13: 9780804197991

Published by Pantheon, 2020

About this Item

Book is in very good condition and may include minimal underlining highlighting. The book can also include "From the library of" labels. May not contain miscellaneous items toys, dvds, etc. . We offer 100% money back guarantee and 24 7 customer service.

Seller Inventory # ZEV.0804197997.VG

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time
• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication Date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804197997
• ISBN 13: 9780804197991
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: very_good

About this title

Synopsis

From the author of the acclaimed Insectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present
 
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.
 
A moving, profound, and affirming meditation, The Book of Unconformities 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.
 
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.

About the Author

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 recipientof the Whiting Award for nonfiction. He lives in New York City and is professor of anthropology at The New School.