The Night Country [Paperback]

Loren Eiseley (Author), Gale E. Christianson (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1997

Toward the end of his life, Loren Eiseley reflected on the mystery of life, throwing light on those dark places traversed by himself and centuries of humankind. The Night Country is a gift of wisdom and beauty from the famed anthropologist. It describes his needy childhood in Nebraska, reveals his increasing sensitivity to the odd and ordinary in nature, and focuses on a career that turns him inward as he reaches outward for answers in old bones.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Eiseley has met strange creatures in the night country, and he tells marvelous stories about them . . . For Eiseley, storytelling is never pure entertainment. The autobiographical tales keep illustrating the theses that wind through all his writing—the fallibility of science, the mystery of evolution, the surprise of life."—Time

(Time )

"The autobiographical details that [Eiseley] uses in most of the essays have power over the reader’s imagination precisely because they have been filtered through a heightened sensibility. Most of us see; Eiseley challenges us to be aware."—America

(America )

"A sort of Odyssey by a man in dialogue with nature and evolution; Eiseley remains one of our foremost humanists—and prose stylists."—Christian Century

(Christian Century )

"[Eiseley] is the raconteur par excellence. His tales . . . all make fascinating reading."—Library Journal

(Library Journal )

"There can be no question that Loren Eiseley maintains a place of eminence among nature writers. His extended explorations of human life and mind, set against the backdrop of our own and other universes are like those to be found in every book of nature writing currently available. . . .We now routinely expect our nature writers to leap across the chasm between science, natural history, and poetry with grace and ease. Eiseley made the leap at a time when science was science, and literature was, well, literature. . . .His writing delivered science to nonscientists in the lyrical language of earthly metaphor, irony, simile, and narrative, all paced like a good mystery."—The Bloomsbury Review

(The Bloomsbury Review )

About the Author

Gale E. Christianson, author of Fox at the Wood’s Edge: A Biography of Loren Eiseley, is a professor of history at Indiana State University, Terre Haute.

Product Details

• Paperback: 241 pages
• Publisher: Bison Books (June 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803267355
• ISBN-13: 978-0803267350
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #481,897 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The size of time and space, November 28, 2001

By 

Kevin Ochsner (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Night Country (Paperback)

I first was introduced to Loren Eisley by a roommate in graduate school who read aloud to me the final essay in this book. It is entitled, "The Brown Wasps," and if you've never read anything by Eisley, you might want to start there. Among many things, this particular essay is about memory, home, and the place of death in life - themes that run throughout the book whose essays are intimate narratives that intermingle meditations on science and personal history. Having now written these words I feel they miss the mark in recommending this book becuase the themes of Eisley's work seem more experiential than concrete to me, which is the case for many truths about life - truths that can be captured more by the feelings evoked by a time and a place than by mere words alone. And yet, his words do a remarkable job of evoking past times and places, locating them in your present life and providing a context for understanding their meaning. If you read this book, perhaps you'll want to share it with a friend, as my friend did with me, and I have with many good friends since. Eisley communicates the happy/sad, excited/melancholic, naive/wise tensions of nostalgia like no one else I've read.

45 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You cannot miss with Loren Eiseley, April 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Night Country (Paperback)

Theodosius Dobzhansky described Eiseley as "...a Proust miraculously turned into an evolutionary anthropologist," and his works are greatly admired by Ray Bradbury. This was the second book I read of his after "The Immense Journey" and it was no let down at all! It too is haunting, beautiful, disturbing, hopeful, fearful, and immensely imaginative.

Here's a taste, from the chapter The Places Below: "If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness, do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession. If you fear the sound of water hurrying through crevices toward unknown and mysterious destinations, do not consider it. Seek out the sunshine. It is a simpler prescription. Avoid the darkness."

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A little night music, November 26, 2007

By 

Cecil Bothwell "Author of "Whale Falls: A... (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Night Country (Paperback)

This is only one among many collections of Loren Eisley's thoughtful works, and I would willingly recommend all those I have read. THE NIGHT COUNTRY, however, remains my favorite. Eisley's vision overlays the human and non-human worlds and examines both over the span of ages rather than years. He will show you tiny snippets of life in a parking lot, shadows on cave walls, deserts, pigeons and childhood memories that will linger in your thinking like dinosaur footprints impressed in mud and baked to permanence by hot volcanic ash. You may choose not to follow that trail again, but I assure you it will remain vivid. Consider the return of an old man to a boyhood home after more than a half century, eager to see the cottonwood tree he and his father planted together. It was the tree his father had promised would provide Eisley with shade in his old age, where he might sit and remember his Dad; a tree that had grown and blossomed and flourished year after year in Eisley's thoughts and dreams; a tree under whose branches Eisley figuratively lived his entire life. Gone. For, who knows, fifty years? And yet, what tree could have been more real, more alive? Like a field mouse displaced by developers, pigeons abandoned with an archaic train station, a bum dying in a depot, or a wasp fading into the chill of autumn, Eisley knows that the shadow he casts on a hotel wall will be that of another man tomorrow, and all shadows fade together into the night.