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Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos (boxed set)

Edited by William Cronon

A modern Thoreau explores the mysteries of the universe in this deluxe collector’s boxed set.

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week Loren Eiseley, “Barbed Wire and Brown Skulls”
September 5, 2017

Interviews William Cronon: The life, power, and magical prose of Loren Eiseley’s science and nature writing
December 14, 2016

Story of the Week Loren Eiseley, “The Fifth Planet”
December 1, 2016

To read Loren Eiseley (1907–1977) is to renew a sense of wonder at the miracles and paradoxes of evolution and the ever-changing diversity of life. At the height of a distinguished career as a “bone-hunter” and paleontologist, Eiseley turned from fieldwork and scientific publication to the personal essay in six remarkable books that are masterpieces of prose style. Weaving together anecdote, philosophical reflection, and keen observation with the soul and skill of a poet, Eiseley offers a brilliant, companionable introduction to the sciences, paving the way for writers like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Now for the first time, the Library of America presents his landmark essay collections in a definitive two-volume set.

Beginning with the surprise million-copy seller The Immense Journey (1957), Eiseley produced an astonishing succession of books that won acclaim both as science and as art. Here, for the first time in a single collector’s edition, are all of Eiseley’s beloved, thought-provoking, sometimes darkly lyrical essay collections, from The Immense Journey to the posthumous The Star Thrower (1978). Eiseley’s subjects are wide-ranging, curious, and meticulously realized: the role of flowering plants in evolution; a disturbing insect, seen in childhood; the questions raised by a new fossil; a forgotten episode in the history of science. Beginning with close observation and vivid detail, Eiseley is fearless and imaginative in pursuit of the cosmological dimensions of the phenomena he describes.

William Cronon, editor, is America’s leading environmental historian. A winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, he is the author of Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), and he currently serves as Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Each Library of America series volume is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Gould Family Foundation.
Table of Contents

The Immense Journey
The Slit
The Flow of the River
The Great Deeps
The Snout
How Flowers Changed the World
The Real Secret of Piltdown
The Maze
The Dream Animal
Man of the Future
Little Men and Flying Saucers
The Judgment of Birds
The Bird and the Machine
The Secret of Life

The Firmament of Time
How the World Became Natural
How Death Became Natural
How Life Became Natural
How Man Became Natural
How Human Is Man?
How Natural Is “Natural”?
Bibliography

The Unexpected Universe
The Ghost Continent
The Unexpected Universe
The Hidden Teacher
The Star Thrower
The Angry Winter
The Golden Alphabet
The Invisible Island
The Inner Galaxy
The Innocent Fox
The Last Neanderthal
Bibliography

Uncollected Prose
Autumn—A Memory
Riding the Peddlers
The Mop to K. C.
Neanderthal Man and the Dawn of Human Paleontology
Excerpts from_The Lost Notebooks_

The Invisible Pyramid
The Star Dragon
The Cosmic Prison
The World Eaters
The Spore Bearers
The Time Effacers
Man in the Autumn Light
The Last Magician
Bibliography

The Night Country
The Gold Wheel
The Places Below
Big Eyes and Small Eyes
Instruments of Darkness
The Chresmologue
Paw Marks and Buried Towns
Barbed Wire and Brown Skulls
The Relic Men
Strangeness in the Proportion
The Creature from the Marsh
One Night’s Dying
Obituary of a Bone Hunter
The Mind as Nature
The Brown Wasps
Bibliography

Essays from The Star Thrower
The Long Loneliness
Man the Firemaker
The Ghostly Guardian
From The Fire Apes
Easter: The Isle of Faces
The Dance of the Frogs

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-505-1 989 pages

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