Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful, introspective, and poetical
Review: This is a wonderful book. Loren Eisley is an anthropologist who writes like John Donne. I went to the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s when Loren Eisley was Professor of Anthropology. He was then recognized as the finest writer at Penn. Though his field was anthropology, every semester he was a guest lecturer for the English department in their Creative Writing classes. Each chapter starts with a theme from nature, archeology, or biology. Gradually his writing turns from scientific observation to philosophical musing, poetry, and introspection. A perfect example is his chapter called "The Dream Animal." In "The Dream Animal" Eisley starts by pondering a genuine problem in evolutionary biology - the remarkably short period
of time (approx. 500,000 years ago to 150,000 years ago) during which the brain evolved from the size of an apes to modern man. He ends with this - "The story of Eden is a greater allegory than man has ever guessed. For it was truly man who, walking memoryless through bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of the world, sat down and passed a wondering hand over a heavy forehead. Time and darkness, knowledge of good and evil, have walked with him ever since...a new world of terror and loneliness appears to have been created in the soul of man. For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief in to the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness." Take your time with this book - read it in a quiet space where Eisley's musings can lead you into musings of your own.
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