In a review of the book, author Robert Finch writes, "Like Melville, Eiseley thought of himself, and by extension all mankind, as 'an orphan, a wood child, a changeling,' a cosmic outcast born into a world that afforded him no true home." He adds that his "distinctive gift as a writer was to take powerfully formative personal influences of family and place and fuse them with his intellectual meditations on universal topics such as evolution, human consciousness and the weight of time. ... he found metaphors that released a powerful view of man's fate in the modern world." As Kenneth Heuer writes, "there are countless examples of Eiseley's empathy with life in all its forms, and particularly with its lost outcasts ... the love that transcends the boundaries of species was the highest spiritual expression he knew.