Annals of the Former World by John McPhee

Annals of the Former World Reviews

• 
  Samuel

  Absolutely, bar none, the finest work of American natural science that I've ever read. McPhee has the eye of a scientist and the soul of a poet, and it makes for truly astonishing writing. I don't like to pile on the superlatives, but this is probably one of my ten favorite books of all time.
• 
  Darwin8u

  If by some fiat, I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence; this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.”
  ― John McPhee, Annals of the Former World
  
  
  
  What I absolutely love about McPhee's nonfiction is his ability to write about place, people and ideas with both beautiful prose and amazing intimacy. My favorite parts are where McPhee weaves place and people, or people and ideas together and establishes the grand metaphor for his book. McPhee picks up pieces of conversation with geologists and their satelites that might get missed by most other writers, but manages to find, keep and eventually place these nuggets into his book (written over 20 years) in a way that works to support his big themes.
  
  Seriously, this book is one of my favorite nonfiction works of all time. You can see the mark McPhee left on his students' writing if you've ever read
  Robert Wright,
  Richard Preston or New Yorker editor
  David Remnick. Some consider McPhee to be the godfather of New New Journalism, but he is much more than that. IMHO, he is the godfather of modern nonfiction writing, period.
• 
  Jamie

  I’m glad I’m not beyond the age where books I read can change the way I see the world. If that is an age you can reach, I don’t want to. I can’t even drive down the highway now without seeing something as simple as roadcuts in a whole different light.
  
  This was McPhee making a study of that place where language and the earth overlap. Beyond excellent.
• 
  Lois Bujold

  
  A most excellent remedy for insomnia, and (speaking as a sufferer) I do not mean that pejoratively. The perfect book for reading a little bit at bedtime every night, easy to pick up and put down, but still worth the reading. It lasted me about 6 weeks; not sure what I'll use now. (Well, I suppose there's still E. O. Wilson's The Ants, but I'm not sure my arms are strong enough to hold it up...)
  
  Layer by layer, McPhee sediments one's grasp of deep time, and of the geologists who study it. A little too accessible to be called "magisterial", but it still evokes that feeling. I would also recommend it as an antidote for the news.
  
  Highly recommended, not that it apparently needs my approval. I'm glad it won the Pulitzer, in its day.
  
  Ta, L.
• 
  Cheryl

  "Geologists, in their all but closed conversation, inhabit scenes that no one ever saw, scenes of global sweep, gone and gone again, including seas, mountains, rivers, forests, and archipelagoes of aching beauty rising in volcanic violence to settle down quietly and then forever disappear—almost disappear.”
  
  “If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”
  
  My first review will be in Annals and then I will review the rest in the individual books. I may be cheating by doing it this way, but in this reread I have a lot I want to talk about and there are restrictions on characters in these reviews and I am running up against them. I found that out with Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where I tried to not only immortalize her words, but talk about how they made me feel and think and ran out of room. So, I am rereading the whole canon, Annals of the Former World, but reviewing each book separately, which they are technically separate books, so technically not cheating by claiming each one separately. And I feel that I am writing the way Mr. McPhee writes, in grand sentences, and with grand ideas, and with caveats and humor, and must apologize for the copycatting.
  
  I also think that talking, reading, and thinking about geology does this to me. Mr. McPhee is credited with opening a huge new interest in geology in us laypeople. I have to credit it more emphatically to Annie Dillard, who has 2 examples of “big picture” geology and deep time, one like a lyrical waking dream, and the other an artist’s interpretation of time: “Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back." I have never been the same, always attuned to the geopoetry of this way of looking at the world, and seeing the links between Dillard and McPhee in my worldview.
  
  An example of what it does goes like this: I read a sentence such as “There was glaciation in the Southern Hemisphere at the time.” And my mind is blown, why in the Ice Ages was there so little glaciation in the Southern Hemisphere? Antarctica is obviously a fertile field for glaciers, how have I never though of this? Why was there in this period he is talking about? McPhee drops information like this often, and sometimes answers the question I have, sometimes not, this being a throw away sentence, so I have to pause and start googling. What a world we live in, to have this information at our fingertips, literally. This is the type of thinking that makes kids into scientists, so I am first, thrilled I can have that innocence of wonder and awe, and secondly, that also makes poets, and that is why this is such a source of joy for me.
  
  ”The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved. The continents, perched on their plates, are thought to have been carried so very far and to be going in so many directions that it seems an act of almost pure hubris to assert that some landmark of our world is fixed at 73 degrees 57 minutes and 53 seconds west longitude and 40 degrees 51 minutes and 14 seconds north latitude—a temporary description, at any rate, as if for a boat on the sea.”
  This opening is so similar to Annie Dillard’s style that I was hooked from the minute I picked up the 734 page book. I don’t think he is copying her, he just has that sense of what hooks a reader and how to plant a thought that all of us wanderers and armchair wanderers muse about from time to time; where is this place we have been set down? There is a new interactive map (
  https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-...) that will demonstrate where whatever place you are interested in has been in the past 20 million, 75 million, 400 million, etc. years you are interested in, and it is like McPhee got that in his head from his travels over 20 years with geologists.
  
  ” You are in central Nevada, about four hundred miles east of San Francisco, and after you have climbed these mountains you look out upon (as it appears in present theory) open sea. You drop swiftly to the coast, and then move on across moderately profound water full of pelagic squid, water that is quietly accumulating the sediments which—ages in the future—will become the roof rock of the rising Sierra. Tall volcanoes are standing in the sea. Then, at roughly the point where the Sierran foothills will end and the Great Valley will begin—at Auburn, California—you move beyond the shelf and over deep ocean. There are probably some islands out there somewhere, but fundamentally you are crossing above ocean crustal floor that reaches to the China Sea. Below you there is no hint of North America, no hint of the valley or the hills where Sacramento and San Francisco will be.”
  
  These passages are one of the main hooks for me, as I travelled across the country several times, only a few by I80 but it is not necessary for the idea, the inspiration. McPhee places the geology in my sense of place and on the land instead of a theoretical or obscure science. I love long distance driving, I love being so close to the land and looking up at the sky; I feel as close to flying on the ground as you can be, and McPhee’s descriptions do nearly the same thing. Land and mountains seem so sure, so permanent, but we know they are not. They become sand. And after that, they sink and are piled upon by sediment to become rock again, and then sand again. So the basic building block of our planet is a grain of sand.
  
  Annie Dillard does an thought experiment of looking at a bird, and trying to visualize it becoming defeathered and de-evolved into a lizard and then back again; my favorite is while in a talus filed, or a sand dune field under mountains, to visualize them building up into mountains and then dissolving again in time; and that is why geology is the “music of the earth,” per Hans Cloos. Or as the author describes why he chose I80, it “avoids melodrama, avoids the Grand Canyons, the Jackson Holes, the geologic operas of the country, but it would surely be a sound experience of the big picture, of the history, the construction, the components of the continent. And in all likelihood it would display in its roadcuts rock from every epoch and era.”
  
  ”Slowly disassemble the Rocky Mountains and carry the material in small fragments to the Mississippi Delta. The delta builds down. It presses ever deeper on the mantle. Its depth at the moment exceeds twenty-five thousand feet. The heat and the pressure are so great down there that the silt is turning into siltstone, the sand into sandstone, the mud into shale. The Gulf of Mexico was a good example of a geosyncline, with a large part of the Rocky Mountains sitting in it as more than twenty-five thousand feet of silt, sand, and mud, siltstone, sandstone, and shale.”
  
  I hiked in the Mount Evans Wilderness recently, along a creek that was carving out the basement rock of the fourteener, and came across a rock outcrop that had an alcove below and a hanging garden above, and it was a wall of the trail, essentially and again, was drawn into a meditation of the mountain crumbling into these giant rocks who live with us for a while and then crumble into smaller stones, and then sand. It is a way of seeing I love. At the same time, beneath my feet, the sand and dirt I walk upon is putting pressure on the detritus of the mountains below us, and rock is being born. McPhee is a translator of sorts, as he says and then alchemizes it: “Geologists, in their all but closed conversation, inhabit scenes that no one ever saw, scenes of global sweep, gone and gone again, including seas, mountains, rivers, forests, and archipelagoes of aching beauty rising in volcanic violence to settle down quietly and then forever disappear—almost disappear.”
  
  This book is one of my favorite of the series, and contains the narrative description of what McPhee coined as “deep time.” He writes about the history of geology in an alive, engaging way I wish all historians could try; and as he describes James Hutton, the Scottish father of modern geology, Hutton “had no way of knowing that there were seventy million years just in the line that separated the two kinds of rock, and many millions more in the story of each formation—but he sensed something like it, sensed the awesome truth, and as he stood there staring at the riverbank he was seeing it for all humankind.” If you don’t get chills from that visual, I am sorry. To see something, to sense it, based on your eyes and mind, for all of humankind is a holy moment.
  
  “It was at some moment in the Pleistocene that humanity crossed what the geologist-theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the Threshold of Reflection, when something in people “turned back on itself and so to speak took an infinite leap forward. Outwardly, almost nothing in the organs had changed. But in depth, a great revolution had taken place: consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space of super-sensory relationships and representations; and simultaneously consciousness was capable of perceiving itself in the concentrated simplicity of its faculties. And all this happened for the first time.”
  
  Annie Dillard wrote in 1974 and then in 1990 in more depth, about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, so I was delighted he is in Basin and Range. Teilhard was a paleontologist, priest and philosopher and my main mantra in life is attributed to him: : "Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within." When I read about the Threshold of Reflection, I wished I was there. In my mind, it links to the immortalized footsteps found in Tanzania where Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints, as Dillard writes in For the Time Being:
  
  “They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago—More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked: it was a rainy day.
  We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. “A remote ancestor,” Leakey said, “experienced a moment of doubt.” Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.”
  
  Perhaps they became conscious of themselves as conscious beings in that moment, meaning, perhaps, we were all there. McPhee writes, “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” Why yes, yes it did, and it still does, maybe always.
  Some deep time analogies:
  
  ”Geologists will sometimes use the calendar year as a unit to represent the time scale, and in such terms the Precambrian runs from New Year’s Day until well after Halloween. Dinosaurs appear in the middle of December and are gone the day after Christmas. The last ice sheet melts on December 31st at one minute before midnight, and the Roman Empire lasts five seconds.”
  
  “With your arms spread wide again to represent all time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.”
  
  “The human consciousness may have begun to leap and boil some sunny day in the Pleistocene, but the race by and large has retained the essence of its animal sense of time. People think in five generations—two ahead, two behind—with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice. The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it.”
  
  Going into the deep time meditation a little differently, about the spans of time in either direction, I loved these imageries:
  
  “There is no younger rock in the United States than the travertine that is forming in Thermopolis, Wyoming. A 2.7-billion-year-old outcrop of the core of the continent is at the head of Wind River Canyon, twenty miles away.”
  
  “And in the deep shadow below the Cambrian were seven years for everyone in all subsequent time. There were four billion years back there—since the earliest beginnings of the world.”
  
  “In six thousand years, you could never grow wings on a reptile. With sixty million, however, you could have feathers, too.”
  
  “On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information. Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways:
  
  “Mammalian species last, typically, two million years. We’ve about used up ours. Every time Leakey finds something older, I say, ‘Oh! We’re overdue.’ We will be handing the dominant-species-on-earth position to some other group. We’ll have to be clever not to.”
  
  “If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”
• 
  Annie

  I've only read parts of this book, since there are many different books included in this version of his geologic exploration of a cross-section of the US. I have a few things to say. #1. Read Rising from the Plains as you're driving in the Tetons. #2. Read any other section as you're driving in the area described. Your road trip will become something entirely different if you can see what you're reading about. #3. Read these books when you're planning a trip to any of the areas discussed. #4. Just read them. John McPhee does connect things better than most writers of text about geology. He makes it accessible while also staying interesting for those "in the know." And the people who are part of the geologic history of a place, like the mappers and surveyers are not mere footnotes in his writing. Oh no, they are the main characters, out for adventure and getting a lot of it along the way.
• 
  Jeff Bach

  As a geology major, a former gold miner, and finally as a hydrogeologist, the earth and its water have always fascinated me. Reading John McPhee is always a delight because he takes what remains mostly a poorly done body of work in mostly scientific terms and turns an explanation of how the earth came to be into a readable and engaging topic. Something just about anyone can enjoy provided they have the curiosity and interest in wondering how so much stunning geography came to be where it is and what it is.
  
  Well done John McPhee!
  
  Great Read!
• 
  Kaylee

  This book has a rhythm unlike anything else I've read, just like geology has a timescale that takes some time to wrap your head around. It's like an opera. Geology and opera both have a reputation of being long and boring, but they are also majestic and complex. This book is long, but it's not boring!
  
  For a while, when I first started this book, my three-year-old wanted me to read every other page to her--the words were like poetry. You can't read it quickly. Reading out loud helped me settle down to the book's pace. There are lots of big words: some of the geology geek persuasion, others of the English major nerd variety...but I wasn't constantly reaching for a dictionary. McPhee throws a new geology term at you, repeats it in multiple contexts so that you get a sense of the thing, and then offers a more complete definition, just in case you still need help. It's engaging.
  
  At first I was a little bothered by the lack of photographs of everything. McPhee uses a thousand words to make a picture, but I still wouldn't recognize welded tuff if it was right in front of me. I wanted a modernized, six minute YouTube clip series complete with reality TV interviews with the geologists right at the road cut...I'm not sure I would have savored that as much though. And also, the ideas still get through. I don't want to be a geologist, and I don't need to memorize what all the rocks look like. But I have a much better picture of the complexities of the idea of plate tectonics, what it explains, what it doesn't. And while I'm sure some of the ideas presented in the book are dated, the big picture of geology hasn't changed too much from the public's perspective in the last twenty some-odd years.
  
  Each book described some section of geology along Interstate 80, as well as the background of the geologist that McPhee accompanies during that stretch of land. (You really don't have to read the books in order, if you don't want to.) Rising from the Plains was my favorite. The geologist, David Love, had a childhood much like Ralph Moody (who wrote the Little Britches series), and Love's story is woven into the geology of Wyoming beautifully. What an adventure!
  
  
• 
  Damien

  Probably one of the best books I have ever read. Be prepared for some geologic rigamarole and a sense of patience and the timeline of ages will unfold. Its a compilation of all of McPhee's writings about American continental Geology. I know, sounds dull, but he uses the lives and characters of the Geologists whose work he is describing along with the massive narrative arc of plate tectonics and the history of the science itself. The story of America's westward expansion along with the Romantic era of northeastern America all seem to blend into a text that can miraculously also explain geomorphology and other remarkably dry topics. Gives the vast expanses of time a tiny human scale which we can then wonder at how our ancestors saw these places as well as the painstaking detective work that was critical to our understanding of how they formed, where these places came from and how in something as seemingly stolid as the ground beneath our feet is a plastic and still changing skin manipulated by forces beyond human comprehension. Utterly beautiful work–I know of nothing else like it.
• 
  booklady

  Based on my friend, Caterina's review of one of the books contained within this compilation, I think this might make an excellent gift for a young man I know.
• 
  X

  For pure enjoyment, I would really give this book 3 stars, but it merits 4 stars for the amount of research and information that is in it and for the wonderful writing style and occasional subtle humor. It is not a casual read, but for anyone interesting in geology is it worth the effort and somehow explains the principles of plate tectonics (and other things) without being overly technical. It also touches on the history of a few areas of the U.S., which at times got tedious, and the many "stories within the story" distracted from the geology. This would not be altogether bad if one were more interested in history and biographies than in rocks, but I preferred the rocks. In short, it is a long, sometimes rambling, but completely worthwhile book.
• 
  Andrew

  Once upon a time I was a geology student. In gloomy Victorian halls and on sunny limestone outcrops we tried to get siltstones and schists and garnets to sing to us, to reveal their secrets.
  
  Sadly, as in all the sciences, many geologists aren't very good storytellers. That's why we have John McPhee. Through his prose, mountains tell their stories. While the stories collected in Annals of the Former World, don't compare to his masterful The Control of Nature, their still pretty wonderful. Geology is the centerpiece, but it's also biography, human history, and aesthetics. Landscape is no longer two-dimensional, but four-dimensional and visionary.
• 
  Lelietje

  To fully appreciate this book I think some firsthand knowledge of the American landscape is necessary. I possess only the slightest seen-with-my-own-eyes-familiarity on the subject and although I have read a lot about it that's not the same thing. I therefore found the book hard to follow at some times. Still for Americans who know their country well this should be one of the best and more accessable books on North American geology I reckon. A little outdated perhaps.
• 
  Matt

  One of the geologist-contacts of John McPhee explains the impact his professional life has on his perspective: "You care less about civilization. Half of me gets upset with civilization. The other half does not get upset. I shrug and think, So let the cockroaches take over." This, in a nutshell, is the escapism offered by this particular Pulitzer-winning magnum opus. Yeah, that CO2 buildup and our plastic debris will leave a permanent mark, but four billion years of rocks don't care about your pandemic anxiety.
  
  The volume is a collection of five books written by McPhee between 1978 and 1999 aimed at describing not only the rock exposed in roadcuts across the United States but also the geologists with whom he traveled. Because I borrowed the e-book from the library, I confess I had no idea I was delving into such a massive volume until I was probably 30 pages in. But at that point, I was hooked. Not that I always knew what McPhee was talking about.
  
  There was fatigued rock and incompetent rock and inequigranular fabric in rock. If you bent or folded rock, the inside of the curve was in a state of compression, the outside of the curve was under great tension, and somewhere in the middle was the surface of no strain -- the two sides were active in every fault. The inclination of a slope on which boulders would stay put was the angle of repose.
  
  Jargon can be poetic.
  
  There were festooned crossbeds and limestone sinks, pillow lavas and petrified trees, incised meanders and defeated streams. There were dike swarms and slickensides, explosion pits, volcanic bombs. Pulsating glaciers. Hogbacks. Radiolarian ooze.
  
  And while I probably read the word batholith fifty times without ever bothering to look it up, through all the texture McPhee imparts wonderfully not only five books' worth of geological knowledge, he builds throughout the volume, offering deeper perspectives in the later books. The setup is far from linear. You don't start in the east and end up in California. You jump around. But you do benefit from the fact that in the 20-year period McPhee wrote these books, his understanding of the evolution of the field as the plate tectonics revolution unfolded also grew. Plate tectonics became universally accepted in the '60s, only a few years before the first volume was written. By the '90s, a flourishing of understanding based on technology including isotopes and gravity fields and magnetic fields had brought to light so much more than when he started.
  
  One aspect of the writing that makes it come alive is the fact that it's about geologists as much as it's about geology. McPhee describes the geology only in the context of the dedicated men and women who live for the study. "We are blind men feeling the elephant," David Love, of the Geological Survey, has said to me at least fifty times, he writes, referencing the Hindu fable of the blind men touching only one small piece of the creature while trying to infer the whole of it. The foremost problem with the Picture is that ninety-nine per cent of it is missing -- melted or dissolved, torn down, washed away, broken to bits, to become something else in the Picture. The geologist discovers lingering remains, and connects them with dotted lines. Geologists "try to put the petals back on the flower."
  
  The ideal scenario for reading this book would be during a cross-country trip across I-80. But absent that real field experience, I found myself pulling up countless YouTube videos to accompany my reading, which enabled me to better visualize a lot of what McPhee describes.
  
  Plate tectonics is the star of the show, the framework around which everything else occurs. But the whole of the story is much more complex. Specific geologies are complex and messy. The Appalachians, for example, weren't simply formed the way the Himalayas are today, by two plates violently colliding. They were more the result of a schedule of arrivals of incoming exotic terranes – multiple collisions – over a long spread of time. "Hotspots" determine new island arcs and may even help cause continents to split. A thin crust and upraised mantle facilitate basin-and-range formation in Nevada today. Ice sheets set up and started Niagara Falls, moved the Ohio River, dug the Great Lakes. There was continental rifting below Nebraska and Iowa 1.1 billion years ago that stopped before it could turn to ocean. Pokagon State Park, Indiana is made of Canadian rocks, red jasper conglomerates from the north shore of Lake Huron, banded gray gneisses from central Ontario. Boston is African rock and the north of Ireland is American.
  
  Some other morsels:
  
  In any rock column, more time is missing than present, because erosion is a bigger driving force than orogeny (the building of mountains). And rock columns are more likely to commemorate a moment – a flood, an eruption – than to report a millennium. Like a news broadcast, it is more often a montage of disasters than a cumulative record of time.
  
  I visited the Grand Canyon at the age of thirteen. The park is uniquely suited to hitting visitors over the head with what McPhee calls its "layer-cake" geology, a gorgeous and linear time scale. But geology is rarely so accommodating. Rock isn't just laid down. It is turned on its side or upside-down. It metamorphosizes and gets moved thousands of miles. It melds with other rocks. The complexity is staggering. The whole Appalachian system continually fed upon itself. There are Precambrian pebbles, in Silurian rock. You'll see Silurian pebbles in Devonian rock, Devonian pebbles in Mississippian rock. Geology repeats itself. Even the wind can play an outsized role in favor of erosion. McPhee describes how a substantial amount of erosion from the Rocky mountains might end up as dust blown by storms into the North Atlantic Ocean.
  
  Oil deposits are correlated with conodont fossils of a particular hue. The presence of conodonts in the rock is an indicator of their being the right age, and the color of the fossils is in indication of the level of compression the rocks have undergone, a determinant of oil formation from carbon deposits.
  
  California is in large part a collection and compactation of oceanic islands. The "Smartville arc" brought gold to California. Toward the end of the middle Jurassic – in the high noon of the dinosaurs, about a hundred and sixty-five million years ago – an island arc like the Aleutians or Japan had moved in from the western ocean and docked here. This was the third terrane at this latitude: the one that followed Sonomia and smashed into it with crumpling, mountain-building effects that propogated eastward turning soils into phyllites, sandstones into quartzites, siltstones into slates – the metamorphics we had seen up the road. In aggregate, the three terranes extended the continent by at least four hundred miles. The third one, suturing here, had doubled the width of what is now California. … If the story of California sounds fantastic, with all its accreting arcs and melanges coming up from the western sea, just look at a map of the southwest Pacific – look at the relationship between Australia and Indonesia right now.
  
  [Hot spots] Great Meteor and Cape Verde seem to have lifted New England's high mountains, Bermuda the Smokies. Uplift accelerates erosion. The rock of the Permian period – the last chapter in the Appalachian mountain building story – has been removed everywhere in eastern America except in West Virginia and nearby parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania, halfway between the hot-spot tracks, halfway between New Hampshire and North Carolina.
  
  An ophiolite is a section of the Earth's oceanic crust and the underlying upper mantle that has been uplifted and exposed above sea level and often emplaced onto continental crustal rocks. The presence of ophiolites – which we see in California, among other places – is a consequence of continental collisions with oceanic plates. One geologist likened the ophiolite to a cow on a cowcatcher in front of an old western train.
  
  The earth as a whole is producing progressively less heat from radioactive decay, and that, at some point, is going to have a profound effect. In the future, the profound effect is going to be that the plates will stop moving.
  
  The plate tectonics revolution isn't the only recent revolution in geology. The ability to identify the age of rocks is significantly more advanced than it was in the day when the presence of fossils were the main yardstick. Iron minerals line up like compasses, pointing toward the changing magnetic poles. Isotope decay rates are known and constant. Rock types can be identified by their magnetic signatures. The magnetic field is sampling the shallow crust, the upper few thousand feet. The gravity field is averaging, basically, the whole lithosphere. When you look at a gravity map you are seeing deeper features of the crust.
  
  One problem with writing about science is that as any book is written, it immediately is threatened with obsolescence. McPhee observed, The thought occurs to me, not for the first time, that I am following a science as it lurches forward from error to discovery and back to error. But this is actually as much an asset of the writing as it is a detraction. I expect this volume will be worth reading even a hundred years from now because it is not just a textbook. It's written in the form of journeys, set pieces, flashbacks, biographical sketches, and histories of the human and lithic kind. And at the same time, it offers discovery and insight.
• 
  Easton Smith

  A trip across I-80, a long wade through the minutia of various academic squabbles, a pleasant foray into the history of gold mining, homesteading, and the movement of trillions of tons of rock.
  
  I would highly recommend some of the books within this book, specifically: Basin and Range and Rising from the Plains. The others lost themselves a bit in the tectonic movements and chemistry experiments. Or at least they lost me. Could also be that I'm partial to the arid west.
  
  But still worth the slog for anyone who needs to escape from the anthropocene into the refuge of geological time.
• 
  Brett

  If I knew more about geology I might give this a 5, but I don't so I didn't. For the average joe to pick this up and read through it would be a battle - especially if the subject doesn't interest him. But as Dennis Hopper said to Chris Walken in True Romance "this shit fascinates me." Different subject matter - same principle. I've always liked rocks and the thought of what went on before we got here - why things are the way they are - and what is going to continue long after we are gone has a certain appeal. There's a certain comfort that comes in reading about something that doesn't give a shit about the Dow Jones, ISIS, Obama, American Idol and the Superbowl. It's a planet doing it's thing and there's nothing you can do to stop it. It's not a predictive science. The geologic history in this book is interwoven with man's history in this country as it relates to the areas across a specific latitude of the US. Though there is a lot of rocks to wade through I really enjoyed the book. I probably didn't absorb much of the various delineations of geologic time aside from Precambrian and everything that came after - but in context to how long people have been around - it really puts things in perspective. The the history of earth were the length of "Stairway to Heaven" we would be part of of one of the syllables of Plant's last utterance of the word Heaven as the song ends - maybe not even that much. There were some very eye opening things that I never knew about as well as far as how North America came together. I was always under the impression that we just sort of floated away from Pangeia or the first continent and that was it - apparently not. The chapter on California was really interesting as well regarding faults and earthquakes, the gold rush, etc. It was just a really cool book if you like earth sciences. If you don't? stick with a novel because this will be some work for you.
• 
  Jan Kolmas

  Recommended by a friend. At times I found it hard to stay focused because of the back and forth jumps in space (east - west) and in time (human history - geologic history), but despite that it gave me a great appreciation of geology, Earth, mountains, etc. Whether I look at a rock, a cliff or a terrain map, it will not be the same.
• 
  Lily

  An amazing read of you are into geology but aren’t entirely super educated on it- though definitely helps to already have some of the base understanding. I’m in California right now and being able to look at rock outcrops and see how the earth moved as explained by the book was very exciting.
  Going to be staring at more rock outcrops for sure.
• 
  Emma Sea

  requested via library
• 
  TheGriffinReads

  Remember driving along a highway and passing through a road cut where the layers of stone in the hillside rise and descend as you pass. John McPhee began to wonder about these roadcuts and over several years compiled a geologic history of the United States through interviews and feild trips with geology professors from New York to San Francisco. His epic adventure immerses readers in deep deep time, a complex poetry of terminology, and a fascinating array of personal stories. He continually reconnects the geology of the narrative to the reader through frequent references to history and periodic sprinklings of wry humor. And it's not all geology; You'll be amazed by Geologist David Love's family history and thrilled and appalled at the rapid-fire recounts of experiences of the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1988, when slabs of double-decker highway dropped onto commuter vehicles and Candlestick Park shook duriing the world Series.
  
  This is not a strictly layman's book. The language is dense, the concepts unfamiliar, and the few illustrations, diagrams and maps insufficient to clarify much of the text. However, McPhee possesses the sensibilities of both journalist and poet. While the reader may have to soldier through ignornance and inexperience at times, the 660 page journey creates a satisfying understanding of the precepts and questions posed by geologists and geology and a grounding sense of the theory of geological time and the formation of the surface of our planet.
  
  Overall, it makes me feel small and ephemeral.
• 
  Lorne S.

  The expression "it's written in stone" couldn't be more true than the story told in this magnificent tale of one writer's journey across a continent in the company of some of the world's leading geologists.
  
  Mr. McPhee isn't afraid of using the correct scientific terminology, isn't worried that the verbiage might be over the heads of many readers. The result is a satisfying read that doesn't insult the intelligence of the reader because, above all else, his writing style is both informative AND entertaining, without any need to "dumb it down" into monosyllabic pap.
  
  The story unfolds kaleidoscopically, beginning in New Jersey, then away to the West along Highway 81, through many unlikely times and places such as an old silent-era Mack Sennett movie, Butch Cassidy's Hole-In-The-Wall gang and a world series baseball game interrupted by a devastating earthquake, and even a multi-million-dollar silver find in what was suppoed to be an exhausted tailings pile.
  
  From the professor of geology trying to inspire fresh new minds in the classroom to the weekend rock hound, to the armchair surfer just looking for a thick and well written tome to help pass rainy days, this book is an excellent choice.
• 
  Isaac Jensen

  An accomplishment of a scale commensurate with that of geological time, this popular science opus takes the reader across the entire breadth of North America. From the San Andreas Fault to the ancient rift valleys of New Jersey, over basin and range, synclines and sediments, and across the remnants of continental ice sheets and Rocky Mountain orogenies, McPhee weaves together the geologic history of the United States. Composed of five books, each tackling a discrete piece of time and space, this anthology crisscrosses the continent and in the process elucidates not just the distant past, but also the rich characters who are now piecing together its story. Impeccably researched, written in a style that is precise without being overly technical, and with just the right ratio of humor to gravitas, McPhee’s prose shines. This is one heck of a book.
  
  
  Edit: I reread this book, this time in geographic order from west to east, before and during my trip from California back to Iowa. I liked it just as much, maybe even more.
• 
  Karl

  A tour de force. Ostensibly a popular study of the geology of the United States along I-80, it's really the author's goal to teach all of us why geologists fall in love with geology. I'd always thought geology was "just rocks" until I read this. But McPhee takes you into the lives of his geologist guides, teaches you about the big breakthroughs in the science, and takes you through some geological events, some slow (like orogeny, one of my new favorite words) and some fast (the Loma Prieta earthquake). You learn a lot, but there are poetical passages in which he just lets the luscious, metaphorical terminology of the science wash over you; don't try to understand every paragraph word-for-word.
  
  This is broken into five sections, four of which were previously published separately. One can read a section on its own, take a break, and then come back to this huge tome.
• 
  Roger Neyman

  I love this book, originally published as four separate books and a short paper.
  
  You need to have some patience with the tumble of obscure terms that McPheee consciously plays off of, but if you have any taste for the depth of science, and its connection to the human world, you're sure to enjoy McPhee's insights into human nature and the progress and process of science.
  
  There is a narrative table of contents sort of guide to be found, which will steer you to particular passages. (It is a big book!)
  
  In particular I love the set pieces on deep time, and the biographical sketches of David Love's mother.
  
  This book is a real treasure. I have read it two or three times, and occasionally picked up bits of it to re-read in isolation.
  
  Enjoy.
• 
  Vagabond Geologist

  This is a classic. There are only two kinds of geologists working in the western US; those that have read this book and those that will read this book. It can be a little uneven but McPhee’s interests in his topic is apparent as is his admiration for the men that sorted out the geology he describes and description of the geology and geologic processes is usually pretty good. If you like the outdoors or plan to drive across the country, it’s probably worth reading this book. It will make the trip more interesting.
• 
  Ben Crandell

  This is a collection of geology books. Each book focuses on a geologic province of North America, so there are five books describing the five geologic provinces of North America. McPhee pals around with the respective expert of each province and interprets the "big picture" of geology to us all. This book- these five books - tell a history of Earth which puts our own human existence in a different perspective. John McPhee is the king of scientific analogies. Very well done.
• 
  Fran

  Nonfiction. The geologic history of the United States as discovered by studying its roadcuts. This book is large and heavy enough to be a weapon. It changes how you look at everyday surroundings. How you pass through the world. And your understanding of place, time, and impact. That's just for starters.
• 
  Tim Knutson

  John McPhee is a goddamn poet. This book is about geology, which might sound boring, except that it, like geology itself, brings the world around us to life. It makes you look at a mountain and think “that giant piece of rock is actually pretty young when you think about it”.
• 
  emily

  astonishing and awesome. awesome in the sense of magnitude and grandeur. it took me so long to finish this but I’m so glad i kept at it. will never look at the rocks of my native california the same way again