The book
The authors
Fears of Extinction
A typical copying mistake
A character-driven evolutionary time
Smartphones in place of bananas
A buried Garden of Eden
Anna Freud and Adam and Eve
LINKS ABOUT BOOK, EPISODES, AND SUBJECTS
Video : Miami Book Fair
E.O. Wilson, Fears of Extinction, and the Avant-Garde
For readers intrigued by the avant-garde and by a collage of voices—as in the modern American classics, Spoon River Anthology, Our Town, and The Waste Land—voices also seem to speak from beyond the grave in The Eden Revelation. Yet this novel is grounded in its characters’ emotional lives as they encounter new ideas.
Many readers of the late Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, especially his bestselling The Diversity of Life, will appreciate this attempted realization of his lifelong ambition to marry the arts and sciences in a creative work. The Eden Revelation brooks this not only in subject and form but in a literal collaboration between a bestselling, award-winning poet-scholar and an esteemed scientist. David Rosenberg’s New York Times bestselling translation of the biblical The Book of J underlies the novel’s vision of the Garden of Eden. As well, Rosenberg’s literary study of the Kabbalah, Dreams of Being Eaten Alive, underpins a lost manuscript. Rhonda Rosenberg’s scientific collaborations and her uniquely written papers on disease evolution inform a story of anxious characters in search of stability. Together, the authors evoke a distant past and a compelling present of anxious relationships. Humanity’s underlying fears of extinction are brought to the surface.