Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #159852 in Books
• Published on: 1994-02-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.com
As an explainer, John McPhee is a national treasure. The longtime "New Yorker" staff writer has taken us inside the world of art museums, environmental groups, fruit markets, airship factories, basketball courts, and atomic-bomb labs the world over. Here he covers the complex geological history of California, the source of much news today. As Californians daily await the inevitable great earthquake that will send their cities tumbling down like so many matchsticks, McPhee piles fact on luminous fact, wrestling raw data into a beautifully written narrative that gainsays a sedimentologist's warning: "You can't cope with this in an organized way," he told McPhee, "because the rocks aren't organized." As always, McPhee enlarges our understanding of the strange, making it familiar--and endlessly interesting.

From Publishers Weekly
In his usual clean, graceful prose, McPhee takes readers on an intensive geological tour of California, from the Sierra Nevada through wine country to the San Andreas fault system, a 50-mile-wide swath of parallel fault lines. Through talks with his traveling companion, geologist Eldridge Moores, McPhee introduces the reader to current geological controversies, and surveys global plate tectonics--the collision and rearrangement of land masses ever since the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea eons ago. The duo also travel to Arizona, where Moores grew up pushing ore carts in his family's gold mine, and to Cyprus and Greece, where rock from the ocean floor has been tossed up to form continents. McPhee looks at the conjectural science of earthquake prediction and gives an account of a recent San Francisco quake. His leisurely excavation meanders from Mexican explorer Juan Bautista de Anza's settlement of San Francisco in 1776 to 1850s gold-mining camps to the summit of Mount Everest, made of marine limestone lifted from a shelf that once divided India and Tibet. With this volume McPhee concludes his Annals of the Former World series, which he began with Basin and Range (1980). Illustrated.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
With this work McPhee completes his book series on regional geology in the United States. The author of more than 20 works on a wide range of topics ( Looking for a Ship , LJ 8/90; The Control of a Nature , LJ 4/1/89), he has a talent for relating complex concepts in a simple, interesting manner. McPhee spent portions of 15 years traveling world-wide with geologist Eldridge Moores in search of supporting evidence for the theory that California moved on shifting plates (continental drift) to become affixed to North America. He also discusses the history of mining in the state and offers sobering implications for those living near the San Andreas fault complex. Although portions of this book may be beyond the scope of the average reader, it should appeal to armchair scientists, rockhounds, and fans of McPhee's other works. Recommended for larger public as well as academic collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/92.
- Tim Markus, Evergreen State Coll. Lib., Olympia, Wash.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Setting the Benchmark for Science Writing
What McPhee teaches us is that most of California, like most Californians, originally came from somewhere else. And he explains, clearly, beautifully and accurately, the complex geological history and consequences of those events.

Yes, this is my favorite in the geology series. Partly it's because I originally come from California, and know some of the areas he writes about. Partly it's because each of the geology books is a snapshot of of the plate tectonics revolution, and this book, the fourth, presents the latest and most developed snapshot. But mostly it is my admiration for McPhee's willingness to take on one of the most complex topics in geology, the ophiolite sequence and its implications, and the sheer elegance of his explanations. If this isn't a coursebook on California geology, it should be. The synthesis of so much geology is a staggering effort; combined with the lucid, even elegant explanations, this has to rank among the most formidable pieces of science writing ever.

Because this is a McPhee book, it involves much more than just geology. The history of Spanish and American exploration, the California gold rush, the technology of hydraulic mining, the mining ghost towns and, of course, a breathtaking narrative of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; even if geology is not fascinating to you, you will enjoy and admire this book.

This is not McPhee's very best book. That's still "Coming into the Country." But it is the best of the geology books and among the two or three best books McPhee has written. And when you are talking of a writer of McPhee's talent, that's saying a lot. My highest recommendation.

Explaining the World: A Joy to Read
_Assembling California_, John McPhee

Also recommended as a supplement to McPhee:
_The Behavior of the Earth: Continental and Seafloor Mobility_, Claude Allegre

Plate Tectonics has joined Darwinism as yet another scientific bulwark under attack in today's America, as shown e.g. at earthage.org, and I thought a review of a couple of popular books on the subject I enjoyed recently that give a very pleasurable overview of this field would be in order.

"The Summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone." John McPhee summarizes his tetralogy surveying the geology of the American continent with this phrase, indicating the depth of time, and the magnitude of forces involved in shaping the earth.

Fleshing this sentence out in the most wonderful fashion by following around a regional geological expert -- in this case Eldridge Moores -- and making the geology a personal story, while explaining technical terms by-the-by, and making the flow of time and movement of continents wash over the reader like a tidal surge, is a remarkable achievement.

_Assembling California_ is the most recently written of his geological tetralogy (gathered together in one volume now as _Annals of the Former World_), and shows the development of Plate Tectonics theory since its inception in the late '60s to the early '90s. One of the books indeed features a completely traditional geologist (_In Suspect Terrain_) who professes much doubt in the theory, while Eldridge Moores, on the other hand, is like a Plate Tectonics prophet, using the theory to explain virtually every geological feature on the planet.

This grumpiness and even hidebound intransigence of 'traditional geologists' who see their entire geological worldview literally swept away by the breathtaking scope of Plate Tectonic theory is a fascinating aspect of the human side of science shown in these books. McPhee himself notes this, referring to geosynclines -- a mainstay of the 'old' geology -- as "a rational fiction", and that "he is following a science as it lurches forward from error to discovery and back to error" (referring to an early mis-constructions).

A book I glanced through, _The Colorado Plateau : a geologic history_, by Daniel L. Baars, has an editorial-style Preface written by just such an annoyed 'old geologist', excoriating the "religious fervour" shown by adherents to the new theory. And I might add that, after reading several books with PT as a basis, I found this book (written in the '70s and re-printed), with it's 'old-style' terminology and complete lack of the plate-tectonic grand-scale overview of why such-and-such a geological feature is there in the first place, to be quite unreadable and boring in the extreme.

The other book in this review, _The Behavior of the Earth: Continental and Seafloor Mobility_, is neither boring nor unreadable, while providing an excellent historical approach to presenting PT theory, from Wegener to the current period (1988 was the date of publication, but this is no drawback from this general reader's perspective). It pays very welcome attention to the subject from a History of Science perspective, with careful attention to the scientists who provided each new advancement, while explaining the technical aspects of the theory with many pictures and diagrams. I found it an excellent supplement to McPhee's book, which mostly lacks visuals to fill out his word-pictures, and I referred many times to the seafloor-spreading and ocean-basin maps while reading McPhee. I don't know how available this book is now, but check the library anyway! Highly recommended.

rms

No index, please
The comments of others largely capture the brilliant and compelling writing that makes this book a pleasure to read. I was sorry when I finished it. But please, no index, glossary, or anything else! This is a book for the layman. Even with a glossary, in six months we would forget the precise geological meaning of andesite. What is memorable about this book (and McPhee's other writing on geology) is that the geological terms flow around you and wash over you as if you were an expert in the field. Combined with metaphors that are startlingly original yet perfectly apt, the end result is a glimpse of the depth and possibilities for fascination under the surface story. Mundane details like definitions would make this book dry and boring, just another textbook. Instead, you get the big picture, told in a colorful and informative way, that leaves you educated about geology without feeling like a geologist.