Rating: 
Summary: More Meditation than Documentation
Review: 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.
| 
