The Eden Revelation An Evolutionary Novel David Rosenberg Dr. Rhonda Rosenberg “The greatest enterprise of the mind is the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities.” E.O. Wilson

Rhonda Rosenberg, born in Houston, is research associate professor at FIU. She has coauthored more than fifty peer-reviewed papers and completed many NIH grants in HIV research. With her husband, she was co-founder of Field Bridge, a think tank in translating ecosystem science into the cultural arts.  She has also collaborated on several books about ancient biblical history and poetics.

David Rosenberg is the coauthor and editor of the NYT bestsellers The Book of J (with Harold Bloom) and Congregation. He has a Guggenheim for nonfiction, a PEN prize for A Poet’s Bible, a Hopwood Special Award in poetry, a Canada Council grant, etc.  Born in Detroit, dual nationality since 1981, Israeli-American, he and Rhonda have lived since the ‘90s in Miami, within proximity of the Everglades.

What is our story?

 

The Eden Revelation is also a campus novel taking place off-campus, in the desert fieldwork of an archaeologist and in cocktail-fueled international conferences—in New York, New Haven, Texas, and Tel Aviv.

 

The action begins with an implosion, a nervous breakdown of an archaeologist who believes he’s found a remnant of the Garden of Eden.  As the context expands, showing the effect on friends, colleagues and those brought in for their interpretive expertise, relationships are jolted—yet so too are feelings about how humans evolved.

The struggle between ancient ideas and current scientific ones—between Eden and evolution—begins as the protagonist’s colleagues are faced with a transcription of his breakdown.  It’s a manuscript which includes quotation from an ancient source for the Genesis story of Eden—as well as the drama of a mind undergoing analysis.

 

Soon enough, the novel’s narrative is questioning itself: What is a story but the accumulation of details toward a common revelation, namely, this is what life is about.  The Eden Revelation, however, makes that story about evolution, which has no known beginning and no known end.  Does everybody’s life begin and end, or does it only seem that way in human consciousness?

 

 

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.