The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time by Raf

ISBN: 0804197997

Author: Raffles, Hugh

Condition: new

From the author of the acclaimed Insectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, endurance, and the absences that permeate the presentWhen Hugh Raffless 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 Manhattans 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 theyve engendered, he finds them losing their solidity and becoming as capricious, indifferent, and willful as time itself.