What makes the book’s incantatory lists, quick peregrinations in time, and archival research all cohere is Raffles’s fierce commitment to looking, looking closer, and looking again. The result reads like the product of decades of compression, like the rocks he studies…. In his questing, compassionate reaching across the discontinuities of geologic ages and individual lives, Raffles gives us a voice that can, for a time, hold it all together.

What intuition the book requires, what detective work—and what magic tricks it performs. Stones speak, lost time leaves a literal record and, strangest of all, the consolation the writer seeks in the permanence of rocks, in their vast history, he finds instead in their vulnerability, caprice and still-unfolding story.

In a high-voltage jolt of insight, Mr. Raffles converts what might seem a dry scientific concept into a potent literary metaphor to help anyone whose sense of time has been fractured by loss…. The Book of Unconformities is so rich in erudition and prose-poetry that I read it like a glutton, tearing off big bites of lost time until I was sated.

Raffles, an anthropologist, fashions a set of narratives that blur boundaries and disciplines through digression and exquisitely long sentences that render the world, as in W.G. Sebald’s novels, simultaneously clarified and enshrouded. It is a masterpiece.

Panoptical and sparkling…. 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.

In our Anthropocene era, no recent work has done more to position anthropology as a discipline that weaves together human aspirations and follies and their links to the planetary resources that make all life possible.

Raffles is serenely indifferent to the imperatives and ordinary satisfactions of conventional storytelling. Character, coherence, a legible and meaningful structure—these are not his concerns. The organization of the book feels profoundly random. There are no attempts to suture together the various stories, no attempts to enact something “learned” by the author. The photographs accompanying the text are dim and blotchy, and Raffles favors slabs of prose unbroken by punctuation. I intend all this as praise.

A feat of immense academic labour that never feels laboured…. The Book of Unconformities resists cataloguing as a methodology and resists being catalogued.