[HN Gopher] What rocks teach us about the human condition
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       What rocks teach us about the human condition
        
       Author : Thevet
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2022-05-16 15:12 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
        
       | westcort wrote:
       | 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 Bolano 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...
        
       | L_Rahman wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
           | Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell without all his hucksterism
        
           | Wohlf wrote:
           | There's often used copies on Amazon fairly quickly from
           | returns.
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-18 23:01 UTC)