A revered ecologist and conservationist examines the origins and possible futures of humankind within the context of the Space Age, masterfully “[communicating] the awesome spectacle of our environmental crisis” (New York Times Book Review) To read Loren Eiseley is to renew a sense of wonder at the miracles and paradoxes of evolution and the ever-changing diversity of life. In this brilliant collection, he considers the cosmological significance and ultimate meanings of our evolutionary history, offering a series of profound, lyrical meditations on the origins and possible futures of humankind against the backdrop of the Apollo landings. As Western civilization attains new heights of scientific awareness and technological skill, he asks, is it also blind to its own limits and destructive capacities? Always a fond observer of the natural world, Eiseley makes a newly urgent, environmentalist plea in The Invisible Pyramid: we must protect the fragile “world island” against our unchecked power to pollute and consume it. “A relentless, haunting, and haunted figure devils the man [Eiseley] and twists from him some of the best prose we have. . . . Eiseley is a master of significant anecdote. There is an unstated but real gothic terror prowling behind his vision.” —New York Times Book Review

In Toward a Dialogue of Understandings, Mary Ellen Pitts examines scientist Loren Eiseley's unique impact as a thinker and writer.

TREASURE is the true story of how the iconic fable The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho psychically predicted the future, and what would happen to Karen Williams in real life. This was at a time when Karen had never heard of Coelho’s famous book. It is a story about the passion for a dream, and how this passion revealed to Karen the language of signs and coincidences which the spiritual realm uses to speak to each of us. Living in Andalusia in southern Spain in the 1990s, Karen dreams of finding and living from her soul. One night, after visiting her favourite ruin, she has a dream in which she is reborn and with this her soul quest begins. Just as in Coelho’s The Alchemist it takes her to Tarifa and Tangiers, and then through a metaphorical desert, finally ending at a place of pyramids as she searches for her treasure. But, this is only just the beginning of a truly supernatural odyssey which goes on for another 18 years. In that time Karen dedicates her whole being to the slow, and sometimes incredibly painful unraveling of the real meaning of the allegory known to millions as The Alchemist. What she discovers is far deeper and more transcendental than she ever imagined and touches the lives of all of us who now stand at the beginning of a new millennium hoping for a new world and a new dawn.

Anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley blends scientific knowledge and imaginative vision in this story of man.