Product Description

Rising from the Plains is John McPhee’s third book on geology and geologists. Following Basin and Range and In Suspect Terrain, it continues to present a cross section of North America along the fortieth parallel—a series gathering under the overall title Annals of the Former World.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58966 in Books
• Published on: 1987-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Library Journal
Although it stands well on its own, this book can be viewed as a continuation of McPhee's Basin and Range ( LJ 4/1/81) and In Suspect Terrain ( LJ 4/1/83). As in those earlier works, the central theme of this book is the geology of an area near Interstate 80, this time the Rocky Mountains and adjacent terrain in Wyoming. McPhee skillfully weaves together the personal history of Rocky Mountain geologist David Love and his family with the geological history of the region, chronicling both the story of pioneering homesteaders and that of ancient seas, volcanoes, and episodes of mountain building. He also details the search for resources and the environmental effect of their discovery, as well as the inner workings of geology. Recommended, especially for public libraries. Joseph Hannibal, Cleveland Museum of Natural History
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“McPhee rides shotgun across Wyoming in a four-wheel-drive Bronco while the geologist David Love steers, lectures, and reminisces....This instructive account of the geologic West and the frontier West is a delight.”—Evan S. Connell, The New York Times Book Review
-- Review

Review

Customer Reviews

The best scientific writing I've ever read
John McPhee is my favorite writer, and this is his greatest work. It is really helpful to have read the first two books in the series, but not absolutely essential. We all have met interesting people, but it's extremely unlikely you've met anybody as interesting as David Love, the geologist at the center of this work, or his parents, John Love and Ethel Waxham. His parents mastered the literal frontier, and David went on to master the scientific puzzle known as Jackson Hole, in Grand Teton National Park. This is the most geologically complex spot in North America, and over a period of 50 years, Love put it all together. You will not find a more fascinating, humane and stirring account of the sciences than this book.

A fascinating tour of Wyoming through the geological ages
I'm not a slow reader, but I rarely read a book in the same 24 hours. This one was an exception. I was immediately drawn in (and by a subject that is not of more than general interest to me), and I more or less did not put the book down until I'd read to the last page.

As a teacher, I'm first of all impressed by how McPhee makes an academic and scientific subject (geology) not just interesting but gripping. For the most part, he personalizes it, introducing an eminent field geologist, David Love, who takes him and us on a tour around Love's home-state, Wyoming, describing over 2 billion years of the geological past as revealed in the cuts along Interstate 80 and in a side trip to Jackson Hole, outside Yellowstone Park. Love is very much a product of his upbringing on an isolated ranch in central Wyoming, his mother educated at Wellesley, his father an immigrant from Scotland who quotes William Cowper and Sir Walter Scott.

Love is independent, old school, hands-on, tireless, scrupulous, an innovative thinker who has made a significant impact over a lifetime in his field, choosing to work for the US Geological Survey after a short period of unhappy employment for an oil company. McPhee captures his very individual point of view, his dedication to science, and his Western perspective in character sketches and fragments of conversation between them. He has a dry sense of humor, colorful turns of phrase, and a toughness that goes along with long periods of field work and sleeping rough under the stars. He's also a grand-nephew of John Muir.

The book actually begins with his mother's wintery journey by horse-drawn coach from Rawlins to central Wyoming, where she has accepted a teaching job at a one-room school. It segues between the story of his parents' courtship in the first decade of the 20th century and his travels with McPhee over 70 years later, finally devoting a long section to Love's own boyhood, growing up on his parents' ranch, with an older brother, among cowboys raising both sheep and cattle. The accounts of surviving blizzards and floods that nearly wipe them out, the visitors passing through who may or may not be hunted killers, even an appearance (possibly two) by Butch Cassidy make this compelling reading for anyone with an interest in the early days of ranching in the West.

There's a brilliant section late in the book as McPhee describes Love's fascination with Jackson Hole while he's still a graduate student at Yale, and after many years of walking the ridges and summits around it, developing a scenario of how it was formed over the eons. McPhee's rendering of this scenario in words is vivid, and in the mind's eye, you can see mountain ranges and seas rise and fall in all manner of climates from tropical to ice age, until the topography assumes its present configuration, which is still changing.

I highly recommend this book. As companion volumes, I also recommend Loren Eiseley's memoir "All the Strange Hours," Geoffrey O'Gara's book about water rights in the Wind River basin, "What You See in Clear Water," and James Galvin's novel, "Fencing the Sky," in which a modern-day cowboy fugitive travels much of this same terrain on horseback.

A towering achievement
In stirring prose McPhee turns the imperceptible pace of geological change exposed in High Plains road cuts into sublime and awesome cataclysms. He incorporates the struggle to survive and prosper of a pioneering ranch family, from whom came an outstanding geologist, John Love. He deciphers the complex story lying behind modern Wyoming, including the soaring Teton Range, evocative Wind River, and Yellowstone. Far more than a guide (with it's helpful time charts and map), McPhee's sensitive writing makes you feel the prodigious forces of the landscape lurking underfoot--almost as unsettling as experiencing an earthquake yourself.

A fun complement to this book is the Wyoming oil geologist mystery Tensleep by Sarah Andrews, or Margaret Coel's Arapaho mystery series.