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Synopses & Reviews
From the author of the acclaimed Insectopedia comes a powerful exploration of history, loss, 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, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than his own.
Drawing on history, anthropology, geology, and ten years of field research, this moving and profound meditation 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 the Greenlandic meteorites that arrived in an exuberant New York City in 1897 accompanied by six adventurous Inughuit travelers. Stone, it turns out, is not only the most philosophical of substances — the substance that forces a reckoning with time -- it is also deeply human in its entanglements. As Raffles follows these fundamental objects, unearthing the events they've engendered, he finds them losing their solidity, as willful, capricious, and indifferent as fate itself.
Review
"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." Library Journal
Review
"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." Kirkus Reviews (starred)
About the Author
Hugh Raffles is the author of Insectopedia (a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Orion Book Award and the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science) and In Amazonia (winner of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing). In 2009, he received the Whiting Writers' Award for nonfiction. A professor of anthropology at The New School, he lives in New York City.