THE BOOK OF UNCONFORMITIES

Raffles uses stones as jumping-off points to create poetic portraits of various times and places.

In geology, an unconformity is “a discontinuity in the deposition of sediment.” In his latest book, the author examines rock associated with specific places—e.g., the friable marble at the northern tip of Manhattan or the glittery gneiss of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland—as part of a quest to acknowledge that “even the most solid, ancient, and elemental materials are as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself; and that life is filled with uncomformities—revealing holes in time that are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, and understanding.” That marble in New York City changed the lives of the peoples—from Lenape to Manhattanite—who have lived there as well as the topography of the island. Raffles delves into the history of the neighborhood to fashion a multihued story, but he always returns to the rocks. The author also explores the sandstone prevalent in the U.K.; magnetite in Iceland; the iron of a meteorite in Greenland; muscovite from many sources; and, in the Svalbard archipelago, “concreted blubber, a product of human geology, the residue of thousands of whales boiled in three-meter-wide copper cauldrons, the spilled oil congealing with sand, gravel, and coal in a rocky mass.” Each section is packed with vivid, entertaining tales, whether Raffles is discussing the enigmatic objects, obscure rites, the Scandinavian occupation of the Orkney Islands, or the geopoetics of megaliths. Throughout, the author is “alive to the deeply archaic currents moving through and around me.” 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. The mood is as unpredictable as next week’s weather, as Raffles remains keenly attuned to the politics and personalities that move the action along.

As panoptic and sparkling as the crystals contained in many of the author’s objects of study.