The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time

by Hugh Raffles

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Anthropology, History, Memoir, Philosophy, Biography

400 pages, Hardcover

First published August 25, 2020

Reviews

[Jaidee · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 "unusual, contemplative, meandering" stars !!!

Thank you to Netgalley, the author/anthropologist and Pantheon books for an ecopy. This was released August 2020. I am providing an honest review.

For the past several weeks I dipped my heart into this most unusual and elegant tome. A melding of memoir, geology, anthropology and history. Mr. Raffles is an anthropologist and a gentleman of deep sensitivity, insight and curiosity. Endowed in this tome are his reflections on a variety of his life explorations, political convictions and both the wonder and smallness of being human within the larger frameworks of time, geology, history and culture. He does not delve deeply into his own grief but allows the seeking reader a way to help integrate their own life story within the context of both universal truths and injustices. As I re-read my last paragraph I became even more sure of this anthropologist's noble heart and melancholy nature. Bravo Professor and I hope you are healing, integrating and loving....

Learned so much about the greatness of the world, the smallness of my life and the wonder between the two.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

In December 1994, my youngest sister, Franki, died unexpectedly in Edinburgh, hemorrhaging during childbirth while giving birth to twins. Three months later, my eldest sister, Sally, killed herself near London, stuffing the exhaust pipe of her car. Soon after, I started reaching 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 my own, stories that started in the most fundamental and speculative histories – geological, archaeological, histories before history – and opened unmistakably into absences that echo in the world today, absences not only mineral but human and animal, and occasionally vegetable, too.

Hugh Raffles is a Professor of Anthropology at The New School in New York, and previous to The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Illustrated Insectopedia. Unconformities opens with the quote above, and as a presumed thesis statement, I found it very intriguing. But although Raffles spends the rest of this book travelling the world, exposing different forms of rock, and exploring the stories of those tied to the various geologies (and in particular, those indigenous peoples, animals, and landscapes exploited by Western White Men), his lost sisters don't really figure into what follows. To be clear: the travel and science writing, along with the historical storytelling, were consistently fascinating – and Raffles doesn't owe me any exploration of his grief or personal life – but after opening with that bombshell, I kept waiting for the material that follows to tie back into what I thought what the premise. Still, a highly original, informative, and engaging read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley, and although I know better than to quote from an ARC in reviews – and especially in this case as the digital version is filled with errors – I only quote to give a spirit of things.)

Geologists call a discontinuity on a deposition of sediment an unconformity. It's a physical representation of a gap in the geological record, a material sign of a break in time, readily readable once you know where and how to look.

Raffles begins in Manhattan, where he now lives, with an exploration of the types of rock to be found underground, an overview of the history of amateur and professional geologists in the city, and in what felt like a bit of a swerve, a longish recounting of the mistreatment of Manhattan's original inhabitants, the Lenape people. I soon realised, though, that the swerve is rather the point: In every locale that Raffles visits, he describes the unique geological features (from weirdly magnetised lava stones in Iceland to Spitsbergen's “blubberstone” – an artificial stone made of spilled whale oil [from the days of their mass slaughter and processing here] concretised with “sand, gravel, and coal into a rocky mass”), and after an introduction to the people living and working in the area today, the majority of each section then details some terrible exploitation of the innocent by the mighty.

Raffles visits the Standing Stones at Callanish on the Isle of Lewis (which stones used to be visible from one lost sister's house), and I was fascinated by the information he shares about their construction in deep history, and also appalled by the more modern stories of the rich Brits who bought up the Orkneys (in a wave of Scots-mania inspired by Victoria and Albert), who then enforced the Enclosure Act and forced the mass emigration of generations-long residents, all while knocking down and pulverising the standing stones that spoiled their views. In what was probably the most disturbing section, Raffles begins by writing about modern meteorites found in northern Greenland and then rewinds to the days of Polar Exploration, when Europeans were first encountering the local Inughuit people. We learn that Robert Peary, first to reach the North Pole, was also the first to convince the locals to show him from where they source their iron – and then he relieved them of the three giant meteorites that the Inughuit had been using, selling them to the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. We learn that Peary's companion on his push for the Pole (and the man who repeatedly saved his life) was an African-American named Matthew Henson, who received no acknowledgement for his accomplishment during his lifetime (he couldn't even get hired by the AMNH as a chauffeur in later years), and along with the meteorites, Peary brought back six Inughuit people for the museum to study, most of whom soon died. Nothing in this book was really what I expected, but it was constantly surprising, engaging, and informative.

The problem, as so often, is time: written, then oral histories evaporate; myths and legends rear up, then fade from view. Only material remains, summoning archaeopoetics from archaeologists, just as it summons geopoetics from geologists, and poetic poetics from poets, all gathering up the millennia to apprehend life from these and other stones.

And so, I suppose, Unconformities is a summoning of anthropoetics from an anthropologist, and I loved every bit of it. Not the read that I thought the prologue was preparing me for, but an absolutely topnotch read nonetheless.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, what is this book about? It is easier to say what it is not about. Based on the title, you might think, as I did, that it was going to be about geology, and there is some geology in it, clearly and professionally described. But geology probably takes up less than one percent of the book, so that’s not what it is about. From reading the publisher’s description it sounds like it might be an elegy for his two lost sisters, who died three months apart, one in childbirth and one a suicide. However, the total time spent on his sisters probably amounts to one or two pages at most, so it is not about them either, at least not directly.

If the book can be categorized as anything, it is social history, each chapter using a brief geological introduction as a springboard to other subjects. Melancholy is a motif that runs through the chapters as they recount the ignorance, cruelty, and greed of mankind, as if we ourselves are just another malign force of nature, one of the random evils visited on the world such as would take the life of woman giving birth, or cause a mother to kill herself and leave behind four young children. It is all part of the human condition. As the Buddha said, existence is suffering.

In the first chapter, Manhattan is described as resting on a bed on Inwood marble, but then the author switches to the history of the native Lenape tribe and their gradual marginalization and destruction by the encroaching colonists. They were eventually pushed west, and then forced off one piece of land after another when whites wanted it. Today what is left of them are as far away as Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin.

There is a chapter on the Standing Stones in Scotland, which had remained intact for 5000 years before they were largely destroyed either in the name of commerce (it was easier to remove them than to plow around them), or superstitious Christianity. In the chapter on Iceland, which exists at the margin of two continental plates, the inhabitants are buffeted by earthquakes and volcanoes, and the author relates the story of a raid by English sailors in 1627 which captured half the inhabitants of one island to sell in the slave markets of Algiers. The chapter on Svalbard (formerly Spitzbergen) describes the hunt to extinction of their once enormous populations of whales and walruses.

The book’s longest chapter deals with the exploitation of the Inuit by Europeans, and arctic explorer Robert Peary comes across as much less the hero than many histories describe. With the typical patronizing attitude of his times, and the certainty that “civilizing” and Christianizing the Inuit would improve them he showed no regard for the havoc he was wreaking on their culture. He took whatever he wanted, including stealing the natives’ only local source of iron, from a meteorite, and apportioning out the wives of his Inuit workers to serve the needs of his crew. While drawing full pay from the Navy, he left his black companion of twenty-three years, Matthew Henson, to scrape by with menial jobs between expeditions. Henson had accompanied him on seven arctic trips and once saved his life, but Peary disassociated himself from him after his final expedition, and only after an appeal to President Theodore Roosevelt was he given a job as a messenger in the federal government. He was brave, resourceful, and the only member of the team to learn the Inuit language. In every respect he comes across as a better man than Peary.

The last chapter uses Muscovite, a form of mica which can be sliced into extremely fine layers and was essential to World War II aviation and electronics, to discuss the German concentration camps and the experience of the author’s family in them.

There are several occasions in the book where the author adopts a very unusual style, the extended sentence. It made me wonder if he was deliberately imitating Marcel Proust, who is noted for it. The first instance comes when he is describing the Lenape tribe of Manhattan, and is in the form of “who possessed two separate souls; who knew and feared the power of witches; who burned tobacco to direct their prayers to the spirit world; who purified themselves and their objects through smudging, fasting, and the sweat lodge; who undertook the vision quest; who appreciated storytelling….” I was so surprised I copied and pasted the sentence into a word processor to see how long it is: 761 words, divided by semi-colons into 31 “who” clauses. He adopts the same style later in the book when describing Thule, Greenland. There is nothing wrong with writing like this, but it pulled my attention away from what was being described to focus on how it was being described.

The book is also extensively, almost obsessively, documented. The main body of text is 256 pages, followed by 101 pages of footnotes. The footnotes frequently cite a dozen or more sources, plus accompanying additional text; one of them is nine pages long. I have never seen a book so exhaustively researched, but based on it I did add several items to my reading list.

I learned some history, a little geology, and a lot about the sorrow and the pity of existence. It is a strange book, though written in a clear and engaging style. I guess I liked it, but I never really understood what the author was trying to do with it.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

The eminent anthropologist Hugh Raffles deftly excavates cultural understanding and relativism, using compressed layers of geological and human history as a kind of fulcrum. It's a fresh perspective and he takes pains not to whitewash any dirt uncovered. The results are extraordinary.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early on in Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities, Raffles offers up this definition: “Geologists call a discontinuity in the deposition of sediment an unconformity . . . a material sign of a break in time . . . both a seam and a rupture, a cleft that can’t be closed.” On its surface a straightforward explanation of terminology, the definition, like much of Raffles’ book, carries a poignant weight to it thanks to what Raffles had earlier revealed to the reader — that his two sisters had tragically died within a very brief period of each other, creating in his life indeed a “cleft that can’t be closed.” Soon after, he says, he “started reaching for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchor in a world unmoored.”

That attempt brings Raffles, and the reader, around the world as he explores seven stones in particular: marble, sandstone, gneiss, magnetite, blubberstone, iron, and muscovite taking us from NY to the Orkneys to Iceland to Greenland to Germany. Raffles moves not only in space but, as rock does as well, in time, deep geological time but also more recent (and darker) human history, most often involving environmental depredation, Western imperialism, cultural exploitation, and, at the end, genocide.

Raffles employs a digressive, associative style, ranging far-afield in thought, with his sentences mirroring that range in their often lengthy “train-car” structure as he piles phrase upon phrase, several sentences carrying on nearly a page before the reader reaches the period. It’s a style that may wear on some readers or try their patience at times, but it’s both effective and appropriate I’d say, as well as rewarding.

The different chapters vary in impact. I’d say the first, centered on Manhattan’s bedrock, was the one the least drew me in and maybe required more personal familiarity with the specific setting than the others. The section in the Hebrides, dealing with Neolithic stone monuments, was more interesting and haunting, with its personal and more abstract connection to his sisters’ deaths (one set of standing stones stand quite near one of his sister’s homes). The section on iron follows the impact of Robert E. Peary’s removal of large meteorites from Greenland and casts a far harsher light on Peary’s actions than one usually meets in stories about the famed explorer. It also spotlights Raffles’ unwillingness to simplify matters, in how the segment on blubberstone shows us the appalling manner in which humanity casually wiped out or nearly wiped out entire species and wreaked environmental havoc for industrial gain in their search for oil (walruses, whales) or coal, while the segment set in Greenland shows the unintended negative consequences of Greenpeace’s efforts on the native hunters.

The subject matter in The Book of Unconformities is almost always fascinating and thought-provoking, the prose often lyrical and captivating. I had only two issues with the work. One is that Raffles’ sisters get lost along the way, and I would have liked to have felt their presence, or absence, more strongly, though there are some poignant echoes of those sad events, as when Raffles discusses with a native Greenlander a recent suicide in their village. The other issue was how abruptly it ended, so much so that I actually had to check to make sure I hadn’t somehow gotten a corrupted version or an excerpt versus the full work. Still, despite the somewhat less engrossing first section and these two issues, The Book of Unconformities was a mostly engrossing, stylish read. Recommended.

[Lungstrum Smalls · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounded down.

This is, purportedly, a book about losing family and finding solace in rocks. But what we read is something different entirely. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Most of The Book of Unconformities deals with the history of humans. We get to these humans through rocks that the author has visited (rocks in Manhattan, the Scottish isles, Greenland, and elsewhere), but the rocks are promptly dismissed in most cases. Instead, he focuses on the lifeways, beliefs, and struggles of the (mostly) indigenous people who interacted with these rocks for millennia before the brutalities of colonization. The stories are intensely fascinating and the author has clearly done a lot of research. But it's hard for me to fully settle into this history because I never really understood the structure of this book or the authors' approach to this history.

If this is a history book, then I would like to know how he came upon his research, what his methodologies are, and what his overall historiographical approach is, especially since he is dealing with ethnographies of cultures that are not his own. If this is a personal narrative, then I'd like these stories to be more clearly strung together by the author's own journey (the mentions of his sisters seem to come as a bit of an afterthought, even though they are supposedly central to the book). If this is a mixed-genre narrative essay piece, I'd at least like some sort of central idea or thrust for the work, something that says: here's what it all means.

Lacking this clarity, the book still held my attention most of the time with the power of the information it provided. I learned a lot about places and people I had never known, and would not be likely to encounter in other books that I read. I loved the pictures that were interspersed throughout the text. There was so much there that maybe, with the help of a shrewd editor, this book could have been strung together a bit more tightly into a truly beautiful masterpiece. As it is, it's a scattered, interesting, and sometimes beautiful book that takes some patience to get through.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

No real idea how to do this one justice; a beautiful book that refuses to draw disciplinary lines and presents some of the ugliest human behavior (vis-à-vis other sapiens and the rest of creation, organic and in-), somehow without causing the reader to lose faith. The very sort of book I hope one day to write.

[LaanSiBB]

In a world of people constantly seeking meanings, Raffles humbly choose side objects as a reminder of narrative complexity. These materials are artifacts simply because their relation to kind and malice intentions. They are manifested as punctum of sorrows and gazes in human history. This is one of the best ways to tell the story of change.

[Jim French · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unexpectedly great: it's a mélange of geology, anthropology, social and political history, travel, memoir; amazingly long sentences. He's got the knack for creating an atmosphere of wonder.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really thoughtful and illuminating set of case studies in humanity’s interactions with geology, time, and each other—how the stuff the Earth is made of can bring millennia together and reveal the traces of the past in new storylines, time and themes folding in on themselves many times over. It’s written in literary style and covers topics well beyond science and geology—it’s more of a book of history than anything else.

It covers recurring themes of colonization, exploration, precolonial cultures, the spiritual and physical power of stone, personal memory, exploitation, and the cycles of history. Each chapter is centered around one type of rock: marble (Manhattan), sandstone and gneiss (Isles of Orkney and Lewis, Scotland), magnetite (Iceland), “blubberstone” (Svalbard), and iron (Greenland). The anecdotes and timeframes dart around in each chapter—it feels like a wonderful wide-ranging lesson in so many parts of each place described.

[DRugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

An enjoyable and fascinating mix of past and present ecological observations and interpretations. This book draws attention to our planet.

[Courtney R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was provided an advanced copy of this book by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I hesitate to give a book that is part memoir about loss a low rating, because I know how much of the author is invested in the story - the time and emotional work invested in getting the piece to publication - and for that effort I have given it the rating it has.

However, the book's actual verbosity and complexity was too much when it was described as a story where the author would use geology through time as touchstones to help cope with the loss. Unless you have a deep interest in learning about geology and stone through time and around the world, you might want to pass on this one.

[Alex V. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Caveat: I did not finish this book, it’s just too much.

The author’s two sisters die in quick succession and he attempts to rectify their absence with a dazzlingly detail quest to visit places on the earth where the lower layer of stone bursts through to the top and how they direct the flow of humanity around and to them. It’s almost written in a panic. Raffles has so much information to impart and so little time since we are not made of stone.

[Tiffany Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It is part memoir, part science, and part travelog. After the death of two of his sisters the author travels the world studying rocks. I think this book was well written and is very good at combing these genres into one book.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the Publisher for providing me with a copy free of charge. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminds me of W. G. Sebald, especially "The Rings of Saturn." As with Sebald, not for everyone. I enjoyed the rangy, restless direction of Raffles's mind, but I can see how someone might find it confusing or just plain boring. In essence, the entire book is Raffles's attempt to reckon with loss, whether geological, cultural, or physical, and what's left behind after the thing is gone.

[Abi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dry read

Lots of data but hard to read and stay interested, at least for me. I enjoy the subject matter though

[Thomas S · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's plenty of interesting material in this book. I don't think it is the book the author wanted to write. Facing personal experiences that were traumatic and disillusioning, he sets out on what may have been, initially, a spiritual quest. A search for what it means to be human, what we are in the universe, and tracing down powerful hints the universe has given us, in the form of what we can learn from -- Rocks. Geologic time -- the lifetime of a Rock --is not like a human lifetime, so the contrasts are well worth exploring. The end result, however, reads more like a home-movie slide show, a sort of "What I saw on my Walkabout" seeking rocks 3 billion years old, 400 million years old, one million years old, or just formed as lava from an active volcano. Raffles knows his stuff, and a lot of it is pretty fascinating. The gneiss at Callanish, the meteorite iron in Greenland, the incredibly fine mica slicing done by slave labor at Theresienstadt -- are powerful subjects skillfully described. Other vignettes and anecdotes are less resonant of meaning. Moreover, the work is not organized as a coherent whole. Profundity and insight are mixed in with gossip and digressions. Almost everything in this book is entertaining, but in the end gives us nothing resembling a vector of enlightenment or insight, or of personal character change in the author's makeup. I suspect the book was sold as an idea that earned a substantial advance, much of which was spent on research and exploration. Having made a major investment of time and financial resources, Mr. Raffles owed the publisher a book, and dutifully set down a report of his travels. I noticed that almost 30% of the published work is contained in the footnotes -- which are good footnotes, but seem to me a little too much proof of how much homework the author did. I think this book is mid-stage -- all the basic ingredients are there, and in due course Mr Raffles will write the book again, using the recipe he feels really works for him. Maybe something like "The Consequences of Learning What Rocks Tell Us About Being Human in the Universe." I feel sure he can do it. He just hasn't written that book yet.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable book that I've been giving to people far and wide. Raffles does that humanist thing, taking a word or idea from a disparate discipline and using it to riff and ramble (thinking of you humanist enthusiasts of the Anthropocene). Geological unconformities are horizons where periods of Earth history are not locally represented by rock, due either to erosion or lack of deposition. Raffles' initial musings on disruptions in time are grounded in both geology and a psychic analogy to the great disruption in his own life following the unexpected deaths of two sisters in a three month window in mid-1990s. After that trauma, he "started reaching 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 my own, stories that started in the most fundamental and speculative histories – geological, archaeological, histories before history – and opened unmistakably into absences that echo in the world today, absences not only mineral but human and animal, and occasionally vegetable, too."

What follows are a series of chapters, each named after a rock or mineral or such like (marble, gneiss, iron, blubberstone?). Raffles harnesses a deep understanding of geology, geomorphology, and geography to spin stories about the way indigenous people around the North Atlantic (Manhattan, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, etc.) understood and navigated their worlds, and how those worlds were savagely disrupted by encounters with the empires and and capitalist schemes for resource exploitation pouring out of Europe and North America. So on top of the physical science frame, there is a deep engagement with history, and archaeology, and cultures in collision. The long strange chapter, Iron, has an especially remarkable arc.

From the get go, I read this book with Google Maps and Google Earth tracking Raffles' travels.

[Linda Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put, an geological unconformity represents a break in the layering of deposition of sediment or rock. The layers abutting each other are of different time periods usually due to erosion of the missing layers. At times catastrophic uplift of surfaces or volcanic intrusions contribute to the discontinuous layers. Hugh Raffles takes an unexpected approach to unconformities, connecting them not only to rocks but also people and their lives. A sudden shock or abrupt loss can cause a break or gap in time in a person's life, thus an unconformity. I admire the way Raffles uses myth, history, prose, poetry and sagas of ancient peoples and places to show how unconformities form breaks in cultures and lives. Raffles uses his own personal experiences of loss to make a connection between gaps of time and culture appearing in modern times. With one third of this book being notes, the author has appropriately "mined" (pun intended) books, letters, photos and historic records to show us the most intriguing areas of unconformities due to movement(erosion) of rocks, stones and monuments, not only by nature, but also by people. So this book isn't just for people who have a special attachment to rocks, but it does help.

[litost · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so happy to have found another erudite writer who is enjoyable to read. Though it’s hard to describe this book. Raffles tells seven main stories about:
* The Lenape Indians of Manhattan;
* The Odin Stone of Orkney;
* The Calanais stone circle in the Hebrides;
* Iceland, magnetic rocks, volcanos, ...;
* Whaling, walrus hunting and coal mining on Svalbard;
* The effect of the Peary expeditions on Greenland;
* The effect of the Nazis on his family.
My favourite bit of writing is an almost two-page sentence painting an inclusive portrait of the Lenape.

It’s not clear what connects these varied stories. Each one makes reference to a kind of rock, but the rocks are always just a jumping off point for the stories to come. In the Prologue, Raffles writes of how the loss of two of his sisters led him to the solace of stones, but other than the chapter on the Nazis, this is not a very personal book; it is a book of wonderfully told stories. The closest we come to an unifying theme is the term “unconformity”, which is defined as a discontinuity in the deposition of sediment, a physical representation of a gap in the geological record, “a cleft that can’t be closed”; likely how the death of his sisters made him feel.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a book I thought I could skim through and read the bits that interested me (places I've been in Scotland), and leave the rest - but, there were so many times my interest was caught, and I had to look something up, I’ve ended up reading the whole thing!

I found it infuriating at times (a third of the book is footnotes, and talk about long sentences!), and I’m still not sure I quite get the connection between the sad death of his two sisters and all the topics, but it is nonetheless fascinating.

The friend who lent it to me (mostly for the description of the ancient Callanish Stone on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, which I have visited) said "I remember it being Sebaldian - one thing leading to another, and then to somewhere entirely different."

I had to look that reference up too - and discovered that Max Sebald was a German writer and academic, whose writings "have spawned a stylistic adjective – Sebaldian. Sebaldian suggests the mournful travel notes of narrators stumbling across Suffolk sands or through European cities, remembered meetings, fragments from books and plays, photographs and paintings; a cut and paste of cultural and personal memory." That reference made sense.

So this book has taught me a great deal, some of it unexpected, which is why it earned 4 stars from me, despite my irritation with it!

[Sherri Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gorgeous meditation on loss, geology, place, history, people, travel, culture, colonialism, destruction, the post-colonial world, what is left, what transforms, and what may remain. The pandemic has both compressed and expanded our conception of time -- 2020 year may have been the longest year of my life, yet I also don't know where the time went -- and I found it incredibly comforting to think on grander scales of geologic time, of rocks that have quietly seen millions and billions of years go by, been altered and changed by weather and movement and humans. Sometimes Raffles' writing is too meandering and it loses itself, and the chapter on Greenland could benefit from a fair bit of editing, but I came away from this book as one might after a magical trip through place (and time) -- wiser, fulfilled, appreciative, and that much closer closer to the mysteries of the world.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

A truly odd book. It's a little bit about rocks/geology, and it's a little bit memoir. It ties several places to kinds of rock, and for most of the places we get a long story about the place.

It was a good book with a great book inside trying to get out. I never before knew about intrepid North Pole explorer Perry bringing back several "Esquimos" to basically be on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, and almost all of them dying in NYC of disease within not so many months, as just one of many things I got educated about. But the writing style is tough, and too much is in footnotes that should be in main text.

I have no idea what the heck the subject of the book was either, because it jumps around so much.

But I did learn a number of things that I ought to have known sooner.

[Swarm Feral · Rating 4 out of 5]

An affective and lyrical work regarding encounter with the deep memory of the geo and the agency of being witness and memory. An embodied work that also drifts into the cerebral but masterfully has it sundered by the sublimity and intensity of the geo. Touching on the troubled work and appeal of the primitivist and mystical and again how that gets ripped through when encountering the geo. As a friend pointed out it is a perfect example of the deployment of what the Deleuzean 'percept' as dispositional and attunement work rather than just deploying concepts. Much more to say. Maybe I'll come back. Great to read with Geonotologies that is much more a deployment of philosophy and 'concepts' with thematic overlap.

[Emmett Pinsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

cross-genre nonfiction—anthropology, microhistory, personal essay. especially liked the last chapter on Iron meteorites taken from Inughuit people in early 20th c and transported (along with 6 inughut people) back to nyc by robert peary and matthew henson (who wrote a memoir, "a negro explorer in the north pole," which also want to read).

author's style can be beautiful and includes looooooong sentences so Proustian (sorry) that I wonder whether the title of the book is a nod to a familiarity with Proust ("In Search of Lost Time") that could have resulted in a direct influence on Raffles' writing.

[Alexa Smith-Rommel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful genre-bending mix of geology, anthropology, history, art, prose, memoir… This really hit on most of my main interests - rocks and the earth’s transformation across hundreds of millions of years, pre-European American culture, the Arctic, paganism, the evolution of urban life, the list goes on. I can see this feeling too scattered to some readers, but the topics all really clicked together for me like a scattered puzzle of my niche mini-obsessions. I will be raving about this to anyone who will listen.

[Flora · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful surprise read. The stories are remarkable in the detail and description. Most of all, Hugh Raffles takes you to unusual places. You wander the former Spuyten Duyvil, a creek that once separated Marble Hill from the Bronx; Svalbard, inside the Arctic Circle; the Outer Hebrides; Avebury sarsens; and Ultima Thule in Greenland. He never loses you as he leaps across the continents following the bones of Earth.

[Adam Burnett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Geological personal memoir in the style of John McPhee and Rebecca Solnit. Compelling, sometimes profound, but often misses the mark by being overstuffed and leaning a little heavily on the coincidental. Always a pleasure though to consider deep time through rocks, stones, histories forgotten, and loved ones long passed.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange upheaving sort of book that took me months to get through, but was always intriguing. I had so much to think about after each section and I learned a whole lot. So well-researched but never too dry, and with a veil of personal tragedy over the proceedings. I liked Raffles' voice as he shared findings and opined on history.

Dense, but worth the journey.

[Annarella · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating, informative and engrossing book that kept me hooked.
I liked the mix of travelogue, memoir and science and I never thought rocks could that interesting.
I strongly recommend it.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.