[.ca] All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life (ISBN 080326741X)

The Terrible Beauty of Existance:
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.

More Meditation than Documentation:
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.

Yesterdays:
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.

If it hits you, it hits you hard:
Loren Eiseley is a tremendously fine essayist. Sometimes, when people constantly sing the same praises of a person they admire, the praise loses much of its power. This may be the case with Mr. Eiseley - so many admirable people say so many admirable things about him that expectations are raised to the point where a perfect combination of Shakespeare and Carl Jung would be disappointing. Maybe you need to have suffered one or more of the problems Eiseley has suffered in his life to begin to fully appreciate this book. Maybe you just need a strong sense of empathy. However it may be, All The Strange Hours is one of the few books I hold as a transforming treasure in my mind. I wept when I read it the first time; sometimes I have to put the book down when I am rereading it because the power of his words draws out feelings I was sure no one else could know about. Yes, some of the stories are uneven, the prose not always polished. Perhaps that is to be expected when an extraordinarily insightful person turns introspective. A bright and honest light on all the places within, including the dark ones, can cause the voice to break and the hand to shiver. Forget the hype. Read Loren Eiseley. Read him for his unexpected way of seeing and interpreting everyday events; read him for his lovely prose; read him for his evocative descriptions of the natural world; read him for the pangs of sorrow he evokes when he shows how humanity is the outcast, the snake in this world. And how sometimes humanity is the bringer of beauty, the reflector of light.

Perfect- I wouldn't change a word:
There are few books written today that I don't want to rewrite. All the Strange Hours is one of them. This is the real thing- forget "Magical-Realism" and forget all other memoirs. This is unlike any memoir, or book I've ever read before, and should be getting out to a larger audience. You don't need to be into science, archeology, or even know who Eiseley is to appreciate this work. His writing is so good that it doesn't matter. He also doesn't delve into the mundane things that most writers would- in fact, you go through the entire book, and you don't even know his wife's name. If I met Eiseley, I'd feel that I'd know little about what he likes to eat, or what kind of music he enjoys, or if he's a morning or night person. But none of that matters- because I feel like I know him on the inside. People who knew Eiseley say that those who read his works often knew him better than those who knew him in person. I'd list Eiseley easily as one of the greatest writers of all time, and at minimum I'd put him in the top 3 of great prose writers. Check him out, and you'll see. You won't be disappointed. Trust me- - I don't like most contemporary stuff, and if you don't either, this is great literature for you.