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Title: All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life by Loren Eiseley, Kathleen A. Boardman ISBN: 0-8032-6741-X Publisher: Bison Bks Corp Pub. Date: May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.67 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Terrible Beauty of Existance
Comment: This is a beautifully written personal meditation on the impermance of life against the passage of time and the attendant sense of loss by a deeply compassionate existentialist who searches for the meaning within the design of nature. There is a palatable sense of both truth and despair. There is also a consistant thread of both awed respect and admiration for the immensity of "the terrible beauty" of existance. If you are looking for a book that balances the invisibly fine line between the light and the dark of insight from the perspective of a honest man who grasps both, this is your book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Yesterdays
Comment: Reading Loren Eiseley, you are a visitor in a world shaped by experiences that seldom have found a voice such as his. An isolated Nebraska childhood in the early decades of the 20th century, and an even more isolating experience riding the rails as a drifter during the Great Depression -- these are not auspicious beginnings for a respected writer or a scholar. His family was poor, and his deaf, deranged mother haunted his life. From early on, he was a loner, with a poet's sensibility, who learned to welcome the gifts of solitude and nature.
On fossil digs on the High Plains during his university summers, he developed a fascination for the evolution of life on planet Earth. He was at ease fathoming the great sweep of millennia in which this present era is hardly more than a brief moment. While very much a scientist of the mid-20th century, he regarded the Ice Age as a recent event. And this perspective colors his thoughts with a sense of wonder that modern day readers are not accustomed to finding in books on any topic.
Eiseley wrote as a scientist, but his vision was always personal, even when he was writing about vast subjects. As a writer, he had a remarkable ability to make his subject matter exciting and accessible to nonscientists. Though he was celebrated as a great nature writer, one of the best since Thoreau, his true subject is Time. In "All the Strange Hours" he looks back over his life of 75 years.
Not quite an autobiography, it is a collection of episodes that were key points in his life. Some are humorous, some poignant, some grimly sad, some angry. There are accounts of recovering his health in the Mojave of California, a trip to Tijuana, where his entire energy is spent keeping a drunken companion out of trouble, a "perfect day" drinking grape pop under a railway water tank with three other drifters.
He writes of academic politics, student unrest in the 60s, losing his hearing, stray dogs, wasps, dancing cranes, a cat that bows and another one that talks, ancient burial chambers, a jail break in a blizzard, and the impact of homo sapiens' discovery of fire. And there are fascinating accounts of dreams. As a writer, Eiseley has a wide ranging knowledge of many subjects, and the connections he makes between them are unpredictable and sometimes breath-taking.
Rating: 4
Summary: More Meditation than Documentation
Comment: This is a strange sort of autobiography - let's just call it a memoir. Eiseley does not really tell you much about his life. He was, it seems, a reasonably successful academic archeologist, and was certainly a well-known and well-loved writer of essays that are beautifully-written speculations on the nature of man, of time, and of nature.
He has been a solitary since his lonely and isolated childhood. It's clear that he has always loved animals, who are creatures he can love and who yet do not break in on that solitude. He married, but had no children. He intimates that perhaps his upbringing was responsible for this (failure?).
If you are interested in this book, it is almost certainly because you have been entranced or transported by some of Loren Eiseley's essays. Here you will not be disappointed in the prose, which still has an otherworldly charm, but you may be left hungry for more actual details of his life. We read biography because we want to know what a person did, who he knew, and what happened to him. Here, you will find much interior monologue, and a few key incidents, but be left wondering about much. It was not clear to me how his character was forged out of his Nebraska childhood; though there are hints of his mother's role, there is not much on his father. He seemed to have had a reasonable amount of worldly success, but we're never sure how he fared as a writer and as an academic. His attitudes seem always to be those of a scorned outsider, yet this cannot be entirely accurate (otherwise why this book?). He was a teacher and a scientist, but we never get a good sense of what he did in those lines. These central activities get only the barest indirect mentions.
The control here is rather loose; at one point Eiseley spends a number of pages talking about paradigms (as we would call them now) in science, in connection with the book Darwin's Century, which he published in 1958. This is intrinsically interesting stuff, but really does not belong in a book devoted to a quite different topic - namely the life of the author. While we could excuse it by calling this an intellectual biography, it really is not, as the rest of the book attests.
Eiseley could be the dedicated and disciplined scholar, as in Darwin's Century, but preferred the speculative essay. This book is really such an essay, but rather larger than he was used to writing. It has not the coherence of his shorter pieces, so is mainly missing the revelatory power his prose could bring to bear on a small incident. Yet, for what it does say about the mind and feelings of a remarkable man that I wish I had known personally, and for the graceful way it says it, this book is well worth reading.
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Title: The Night Country by Loren Eiseley, Leonard Everett Fisher, Gale E. Christianson ISBN: 0803267355 Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: June, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Immense Journey : An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature by Loren Eiseley ISBN: 0394701577 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 January, 1959 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: The Star Thrower by Loren C. Eiseley, W. H. Auden ISBN: 0156849097 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: September, 1979 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Unexpected Universe by Loren C. Eiseley ISBN: 0156928507 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: October, 1972 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Firmament of Time by Loren Eiseley, Gary Holthaus ISBN: 0803267398 Publisher: Bison Bks Corp Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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