I wanted to like this book. Eiseley is a wonderful stylist - his phrases graceful, his word choices always interesting and surprising. I felt when I started the collection like I was on a journey that was going to lead to a new wise understanding of the universe we're in. But as I read on, his unrelenting bleak personal outlook weighed on me more and more heavily. I began to scan and then found I really didn't want to pick it up again. ( )

I'm so glad to have discovered Eiseley with The Immense Journey. His dark, beautiful universe continues to enthrall. He's now one of the very few authors of whom I'll probably try to become a completist. He is such a pleasure, a melancholy, hope-at-the-edge-of-despair pleasure to read. It does make me sad to think that the darkness of the mid-20th century vision of humanity's future that haunted his writings doesn't seem one bit less relevant in the beginning of the 21st century. We may have more facts at our fingertips now, but they don't seem to have made our species wiser or brought us any closer to understanding how to live. ( )

A collection of essays (along with a few poems) by anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley, published in 1978, a year after his death. Some of the essays deal with anthropology or evolutionary science, but most of them are more philosophical or feature personal musings about his encounters with nature. There are also a couple discussing the life and writings of Thoreau.

I have strong memories of reading Eiseley sometime in my teenage years, including a few of the essays in this collection, and being greatly affected by the beauty and depth of his writing, so I was very much looking forward to revisiting his work. Alas, sometimes we really should not reread the things that moved us when we were teens.

Don't get me wrong. Eiseley's writing is still beautiful, heartfelt, and poetic. And there are moments of wonder and insight to be found here, even if they're not quite as I remembered them. But his work is permeated by an ambiguous, vaguely religious sort of mysticism that I don't find particularly congenial these days and often based on premises I don't necessarily buy into, even when I agree with him on specifics. Much of his writing features an uneasy sense of the perceived conflict between reductionist science and what one might call a more spiritual view of nature; whereas I tend to regard that as a false conflict and a false dichotomy. Also, several of the essays do feel a bit dated, sometimes factually -- one piece revolves around the now-disputed cold-bloodedness of dinosaurs -- but more often linguistically. It is unpleasantly disconcerting, in the 21st century, to see an anthropologist casually referring to tribal peoples as "savages."

I have no doubt that many people are likely to find Eiseley's lyrical writing still speaks to them as much as it did to me two decades ago. But I can't help feeling a little disappointed.

As for the rating... Man, this is a hard one. Putting it in the three-star range seems to devalue the thoughtfulness, sincerity, and lovely prose to be found in this collection, but to give it four stars would misrepresent my personal reaction to it. Well, call it an even more subjective than usual 3.5/5, I guess. ( )

This book was my introduction to Loren Eiselely. Having read it just out of high school, it gave me a new lens through which to view the world. ( )