What rocks teach us about the human condition

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2022/05/the-book-of-unconformities-hugh-raffles-review

by Thevet • 4 years ago

30 8 4 years ago

L_Rahman• 4 years ago

Not the type of book whose review I would expect to see here. The reviewer was evocative enough for me to pick up a used copy on Amazon. Thanks for sharing.

metadat• 4 years ago

I was like "How are there already used copies?", and found it was first published in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Raffles

Hugh Raffles looks like an interesting fellow.

oh_sigh• 4 years ago

Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell without all his hucksterism

Wohlf• 4 years ago

There's often used copies on Amazon fairly quickly from returns.

westcort• 4 years ago

My key takeaways:

* This extraordinary book will win devotees among that minority who don’t see “stories” everywhere, who resent the hegemony of narrative, and who perhaps experience time more like a spiral or, as Roberto Bolaño puts it in the epigraph, “not a river but an earthquake happening nearby”

* The book is an invented composite itself – part travelogue, part memoir, part history, part psychogeography

* Raffles travelled to Theresienstadt and immersed himself there but eventually felt he’d “lost his appetite to add to the literature of terror”, as it re-awakens all around us

* In Hugh Raffles' profound, genre-straddling new book, stones and minerals reveal the pain of loss and the secrets of time

* When it eventually ends, it leaves you not breathless but wonderstruck

* The author travels from New York to Scotland, Svalbard to Greenland, but the first person features rarely; it glints, like the mica he considers in the epilogue

* Like Trinitite, formed at the New Mexico atomic test site in 1945, and plastiglomerates, first recorded in Hawaii in 2013, blubberstone is “a geological artifact of world history”

* Lifeways that have developed over millennia for peoples or animals can be snapped

The book is called "The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time" and you can find it on Goodreads here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48986277-the-book-of-unc...

qiskit• 4 years ago

So it's not ovid's deucalion and pyrrha but kinda like it.

0898• 4 years ago

I’ve never quite grasped, what does the term “condition” mean in this context?

balsam• 4 years ago

It is PR-speak for the enlightenment conferred by a liberal education. Often seen in Ivy League brochures. In this case the author is comparing the book to a freshman experience.

What rocks teach us about the human condition

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