The Book of Unconformities

A spellbinding time travelogue . . . Raffles's dense, associative, essayistic style mirrors geological transformation, compressing and folding chronologies like strata in metamorphic rock . . . Mesmerizing. --Harper's Magazine 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 As strange as it is beautiful, The Book of Unconformities is a work of great originality and imaginative force. --Elizabeth Kolbert 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