New Books (Origo, Nettel, Raffles)

Reviews of Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato,” Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar,” David A. Bell’s “Men on Horseback,” and Hugh Raffles’s “The Book of Unconformities” (Harper’s)

In “The Book of Unconformities” ($30, Pantheon), Hugh Raffles contemplates the curious lives of stones from the Bronx to Iceland, demonstrating that “even the most solid, ancient, and elemental materials are as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.” The author, an anthropologist, has written books about insects and the Amazon, but The Book of Unconformities has a more personal origin: the deaths of two of Raffles’s sisters, one of whom lived on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. A pilgrimage to the nearby standing stones of Callanish leads Raffles to visit other stone circles and to develop a preoccupation with what geologists call unconformities—divides between sedimentary strata that signify breaks in geological time.