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Basin and Range

(Annals of the Former World #1)

John McPhee

4.20 · Rating details · 3,156 ratings · 225 reviews

The first of John McPhee’s works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world—a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from ...more

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Paperback, 240 pages

Published April 1st 1982 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published April 1st 1981)

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Annals of the Former World by John McPhee

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Apr 01, 2012 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2012

What I absolutely love about McPhee's nonfiction is his ability to write about place (Bason and Range), people (Deffeyes) and ideas (plate tectonics) 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. Example:

"At any given moment, no two geologists are going to have their heads exactly the same level of acceptance of all hypotheses and theories that are floating ...more

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Apr 10, 2010 Tom rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science

Rocks. A book on rocks. A book on rocks that rocks. There was a time when I would've assumed that a head full of rocks was a prerequisite for reading a book on rocks. There was a time when I wasn't aware of John McPhee. McPhee rocks.

Why? This book rocks because it's really about time, or as McPhee calls it, "deep time" -- the mind-blowing discovery that the planet is a pebble or two older than, say 40,000 years, which, once upon a time, was the received wisdom about Mother Earth's age. Turns out Rocks. A book on rocks. A book on rocks that rocks. There was a time when I would've assumed that a head full of rocks was a prerequisite for reading a book on rocks. There was a time when I wasn't aware of John McPhee. McPhee rocks.

Why? This book rocks because it's really about time, or as McPhee calls it, "deep time" -- the mind-blowing discovery that the planet is a pebble or two older than, say 40,000 years, which, once upon a time, was the received wisdom about Mother Earth's age. Turns out we missed her birthday by a few ticks and tocks of the planet's natural time piece (you got it -- more rocks). Whatever divine stork delivered the planet in a galactic diaper flapped its wings this way around 5 billion years ago (give or take millenium or two). Whatever god you worship, curse, ignore, or deny, that's a significant miscalculation that's hard to sweep under the crusty carpet of our geological living room.

But before you grow melancholic under the existential landslide of that idea, rest assured that McPhee serves as a most lucid and entertaining guide of the geological heavings and grindings underlying (literally) that process whereby our understanding of time shifted from Biblical finitude to scientific near infinity (and if you need a little OTC supplement to calm your nerves, may I suggest chanting Theodore Roethke's wise line, "All finite things reveal infinitude"). As in all his books (or at least the ones I've read), he does this by organizing his material around a story featuring an expert protagonist, in this case the geologist Ken Deffeyes, whom McPhee follows around, learning how to read the face of rock, rendering the abyss of various fault lines more compreshensible than terrifying. But the real character that makes this such a fascinating read, whether for expert or novice, is McPhee's vivid but never intrusive prose. Permit me just one sample with a description of one feature of the Great Basin in Nevada: "In the manner of a seesaw, the high, mountain side of the block as a whole reached a state of precarious and temporary truce with God, physics, and mechanical and chemical erosion, not to mention, far below, the agitated mantle, which was running a temperature hotter than normal, and was, almost surely, controlling the action."

It is lines like that one that have transformed my weekly Sunday drives back from my sweetie's home in Southwest Virginia, as I slalom down through the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Piedmont of North Carolina dropping off a thousand feet and sweeping out into a vast plain that resembles a leafy ocean floor it may once have been and may well become again. Instead of speeding home heedlessly, preoccupied with thoughts of the coming work week filled with meetings, classes, bills, and chores, I tap the breaks now and then in an attempt to savor the descent and momentarily forestall my own passage into deep time. ...more

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Dec 17, 2008 Margie rated it liked it

Recommends it for: rock hounds,

Recommended to Margie by: a cast of thousands

Shelves: geoscience, series

This would be two-and-half stars, if that were an option.

I very much wanted to love this book. It's been recommended to me multiple times by multiple people, even long before I started working with geologists, long before I held oolites in my hand, or saw an angular unconformity, or got to know Walter Alvarez.

Although I'm not an earth scientist, I'm familiar with most of the ideas in the book, and recognized many of the words. I'm interested in geology. So I was presumably in the target audien ...more

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Nov 15, 2020 Left Coast Justin rated it it was amazing

I read this long ago, but am going through a review-writing drought as I work my way through two very long other books.

Back in my college days, I once, with two other people, rented half of a duplex in the 'student ghetto' adjoining the university. Because space was so tight, my delightful roommate Maureen would leave a lot of her school-related stuff heaped up in the living room. One day I spied this slender volume resting atop a stack of thick, boring textbooks and asked her about it, since it I read this long ago, but am going through a review-writing drought as I work my way through two very long other books.

Back in my college days, I once, with two other people, rented half of a duplex in the 'student ghetto' adjoining the university. Because space was so tight, my delightful roommate Maureen would leave a lot of her school-related stuff heaped up in the living room. One day I spied this slender volume resting atop a stack of thick, boring textbooks and asked her about it, since it appeared to be about geology and she was studying microbiology.

"It's actually for my English class," she answered, "and it's really good. You should check it out someday." Now, Maureen was a shy, nerdy type beset by personal issues that it broke my heart to witness, because she was one of those people who made me feel like a clumsy, lumbering bozo just to even bid her good morning. Of what possible use could I be with her self-destructive spiral? Regardless, so wise did she seem that I considered any advice from her to be indispensable. So as the end of the school year neared, I asked if I could borrow it, and read it in one protracted sitting.

This was the first John McPhee book I ever read, and I instantly became one of his many fans. He has, it seems to me, the best job in the world: Become interested in something. Devote months, if not years, hanging out with experts in the field and learning everything you can about the subject. Write fascinating books about these topics. Move on to the next thing. The things he's become interested are completely random, and include oranges, plate tectonics, nuclear weapons, lacrosse, shipping, Alaska.....In each of these topics, and many others besides, he has written what many consider the definitive review.

And remember: Although this book was about geology (the first of four books in a series, which together describe the infra-infrastructure of the United States, and use this as an exploration of geology in general), she was reading it for her English class, because McPhee is such a masterful writer. The four books of this series are the best science writing I have ever encountered; the second best, a book called The Neaderthal Enigma, was written by one of McPhee's students. (In his day job, McPhee was a professor at Princeton). His secret sauce consists of letting scientists themselves describe the science, while McPhee describes the scientists. His research, as noted, takes place over months and years and feels comprehensive. He excises about 95% of what he's learned in the interests of readability, and comes across as a curmudgeonly-but-approachable expert in all that he writes.

This book explores the mountainous region that begins, as one travels west-to-east, in the Sierra Nevada of California and across Nevada and Utah, a region of unsurpassed natural beauty and vast, depopulated regions still dominated by pines, birds and lizards. In Nevada, the strips of desert between mountain ranges are so forbidding that each mountain range is an island, biologically speaking, and evolution occurs much as it did where Darwin studied his finches. This region ends just east of Salt Lake City; the Rocky Mountains are a different thing entirely, and appeared fifty million years before the mountains of the far West. In fact, as those of us living in earthquake-rattled California are aware, the Sierra is still rising. These mountains, McPhee explains, are like 'stretch marks' -- due to plate tectonics, the earth here is literally pulling apart, and huge blocks of stone tip as they break free. That's why the mountains here are rather shallow-sloped on one side and extremely steep on the other -- think of a sidewalk square pried up on one side.

I'll review the other three books as time permits, which describe the Appalachians, the Rockies and California, respectively. (Yes, California is so weird that it merits its own book -- not that anybody should be surprised.) ...more

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May 16, 2010 Matt rated it liked it

This book had such potential to be a 5 star, but alas...

I have a great interest in geology/paleontology and was excited to read a book that would lay out geology and geological subjects in such a way as to make it interesting to us lay-folk. McPhee attempts to do this by following a geologist along I-80 in the Basin and Range (Nevada and western Utah) and intermingling this region's interesting geologic history with the story of the geologist. This approach was both good and bad, making the book ...more

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May 18, 2011 Graychin rated it really liked it

I was the man walking all over San Francisco with a pillow under his arm. It was the wrong kind of pillow and I had to exchange it. I got a few looks aboard the train. I suffered a few comments at the office too. But the lunch-hour march down Townsend Street was the worst part: a wind in the February style, shin splints from a hard pace, slanting rain in the eyes, and mud puddles for sidewalks through an industrial sector of the city. Then there were the art students, twenty or thirty of them, s I was the man walking all over San Francisco with a pillow under his arm. It was the wrong kind of pillow and I had to exchange it. I got a few looks aboard the train. I suffered a few comments at the office too. But the lunch-hour march down Townsend Street was the worst part: a wind in the February style, shin splints from a hard pace, slanting rain in the eyes, and mud puddles for sidewalks through an industrial sector of the city. Then there were the art students, twenty or thirty of them, squinting at the tips of their lit cigarettes near the Academy campus. They parted like waters for Moses to watch the bourgeois thirty-something pass on his incomprehensible errand.

I thought of what I’d read that morning in John McPhee’s Basin and Range. “On the geologic timescale,” McPhee writes, “a human life is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about.” Infinitely briefer, then, and even less worth consideration, was my present discomfort. McPhee expands on the idea by quoting a geologist friend:

“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.”

Looking round at the train tracks, the warehouses, the built-up terraced hills of the city, for a moment I saw the place through a lens of geologic time: I walked atop the Cambrian seabed in clouds of groping arthropods; I was wrapped in folds of cooling rock; I was buried in volcanic ash and thrust above the surface of the waters. Before my eyes the city resolved into a work of insects, a temporary beeswax hive. There were eons still to roll over it. My own consciousness was reduced, by a weight of years that smothered sensible regret, to the briefest electric spark of dream in one immemorial night.

I came to the shop where our misbegotten purchase had occurred a few days before. A middle-aged man in round, frameless glasses helped make my exchange. He had a gray goatee and a pleasant voice. Ten minutes later I passed through the crowd of students again with an apparently identical pillow under my arm, like someone on his way to a slumber party at an address he can’t find. ...more

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Aug 13, 2014 Erich rated it it was amazing

I had heard about John's more popular titles while in college, Encounters..., In Control of Nature, etc. and heard all the good things about his writing, but had never read him. I picked up Basin and Range as something to read while my dad entered his cancer-induced coma and I would keep him company while he was dying. The book was the perfect combination of escape and realism for me at the time. It gave me relief during my grief and and gave me something to look forward to after the imminent de ...more

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Mar 04, 2018 Ben Goldfarb rated it really liked it

Incredible to reflect on just how recently plate tectonics became settled science.

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Dec 07, 2007 X rated it liked it

Recommends it for: geologists or people interested in geology

This was surprisingly good. It's not something I would have read if I hadn't needed to for school, but it was very interesting, and I may consider reading the rest of the series. The book covered mountain building, volcanism, mining, plate tectonics, and continental drift, and also gave brief historical accounts of famous geologists, while describing the author's field trip with a geology professor. At times it seemed to skip around too much, though it always came back to the main point of cont ...more

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Feb 08, 2014 Chrisl rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dewey500s, 1980s, short-stuff

Classic perspective provider.
Developed an interest in geology after moving to Central Oregon, where USA's early astronauts trained in the rich array of diverse landscapes. Have since spent many hours with Mister McPhee.
***
Here in Crook County, the geographic center of Oregon, the land is also divided between Basin and Range domain and Columbia River drainage. The Maury Mountains in the south section of the county separate the Basin from the Crooked River drainage in the Ochoco Mountains. The Cr ...more

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Mar 16, 2010 Lobstergirl rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: got-rid-of

I never would have read this on my own; it was a class assignment. But it was surprisingly fascinating for a book on rock formations. I regret getting rid of it. I think I was trying to raise some quick cash to buy ramen noodles or something.

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Jun 06, 2011 Craig Werner rated it really liked it

Shelves: nature, science, west

Interesting revisiting the work that more or less introduced me to the "geo-poetry" (pioneering geologist Harry Hess's term) of plate tectonics and brought a lyrical sense of deep geological time to life. Some details of our understanding of the earth's dynamics have changed, almost all of them in ways that confirm the basic vision. McPhee builds the book around his encounters with geologists and the basins and ranges fanning out from Interstate 80, primarily in the West, and nothing about eithe ...more

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Aug 18, 2015 Brian Switek rated it really liked it

I feel a little bad giving this book less than five stars. It's supposed to be an all-time classic for the geologically-minded. But while McPhee weaves some lovely geopoetry on his journey, intrusions in his prose can be denser than the rocks he's trying to describe. He's at his best when rhapsodizing about ideas and history, which the great expanses of the west certainly bring to mind. ...more

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Feb 12, 2010 Ralph rated it it was amazing

Even though it was written over 30 years ago, it might be the most eloquent description of plate tectonics, historical geology, and the geology of the Great Basin ever written!

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Sep 07, 2020 Cheryl rated it it was amazing

See the review for Annals of the Former World for the beginning of this review.

My last thought for the book is the idea that as the North American Continent is spreading apart in the Basin and Range (from Salt Lake City to Reno which are spreading about 1 inch every ten years, and dipping into Mexico), it will open an ocean. “The Red Sea of today was what the Atlantic and its two sides had looked like about twenty million years after the Atlantic began to open. The Red Sea today was what the Bas See the review for Annals of the Former World for the beginning of this review.

My last thought for the book is the idea that as the North American Continent is spreading apart in the Basin and Range (from Salt Lake City to Reno which are spreading about 1 inch every ten years, and dipping into Mexico), it will open an ocean. “The Red Sea of today was what the Atlantic and its two sides had looked like about twenty million years after the Atlantic began to open. The Red Sea today was what the Basin and Range would probably look like at some time in the future.” Geologist use their knowledge and instinct, or gut feelings to theorize where exactly the ocean will open up, either the Great Salt Lake’s ancestral Lake Bonneville in Utah, or like a zipper from the Gulf of California, or from the Cape Mendocino fault line in Northern California from the Pacific.

“The geologist Kenneth Deffeyes places his hands on the map so that they frame the Garlock and Mendocino faults and hold between them a large piece of California—from Bakersfield to Redding, roughly, and including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Fresno—not to mention the whole of the High Sierra, Reno, and ten million acres of Nevada.” Under water. A new ocean. My idea of heaven is knowing if any of this conjecture is right. Of being able to see what happens.

Exactly like Annie Dillard writes: “Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, ‘that was a good time then, a good time to be living.’ And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean's shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, Yes, that's how it was then, that part there we called ‘France’ I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.”

Other interesting thoughts, topics, teasers:

Solid-earth tides could break it up, too. The sea is not all that responds to the moon. Twice a day the solid earth bobs up and down, as much as a foot. That kind of force and that kind of distance are more than enough to break hard rock. Wells will flow faster during lunar high tides.

The country rock was a shale, which had earlier been the deep muck of some Triassic lake, where the labyrinthodont amphibians lived, and paleoniscid fish.

To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane. The rock itself are the essential clues to the scenes in which the rock began to form—a lake in Wyoming, about as large as Huron; a shallow ocean reaching westward from Washington.

There’s a little bit of the humanities that creeps into geology, and that’s why I am in it. You can’t prove things as rigorously as physicists or chemists do.

To be sure, there is plenty of absorbing geology under the shag of eastern America, galvanic conundrums in Appalachian structure and intricate puzzles in history and stratigraphy.

The physiographic boundary is indistinct where you shade off the Allegheny Plateau and onto the stable craton, the continent’s enduring core, its heartland, immemorially unstrained, the steady, predictable hedreocraton—the Stable Interior Craton. There are old mountains to the east, maturing mountains to the west, adolescent mountains beyond.
The craton has participated on its edges in the violent creation of the mountains. But it remains intact within, and half a nationwide—the lasting, stolid craton, slowly, slowly downwasting. It has lost five centimetres since the birth of Christ.

Now with each westward township the country thickens, rises—a thousand, two thousand, five thousand feet—on crumbs shed off the Rockies and generously served to the craton. At last the Front Range comes to view—the chevroned mural of the mountains, sparkling white on gray, and on its outfanning sediments you are lifted into the Rockies and you plunge through a canyon to the Laramie Plains.

Geologists communicated in English; and they could name things in a manner that sent shivers through the bones.

He explained that gold is not merely rare. It can be said to love itself. It is, with platinum, the noblest of the noble metals—those which resist combination with other elements. Gold wants to be free. In cool crust rock, it generally is free.

In the southern part of the province, in the Mojave, the ranges have stopped rising and are gradually wearing away. The Shadow Mountains. The Dead Mountains, Old Dad Mountains, Cowhole Mountains, Bullion, Mule, and Chocolate mountains. They are inselberge now, buried ever deeper in their own waste.

The ranges of the Basin and Range came up another way. The crust—in this region between the Rockies and the Sierra—is spreading out, being stretched, being thinned, being literally pulled to pieces. The sites of Reno and Salt Lake City, on opposite sides of the province, have moved apart sixty miles.The escarpment of the Wasatch Mountains—easternmost expression of this immense suite of mountains—faced west. The Sierra—the westernmost, the highest, the predominant range, with Donner Pass only halfway up it—presented its escarpment to the east.

For another example, the last Pleistocene ice sheet loaded two miles of ice onto Scotland, and that dunked Scotland in the mantle. After the ice melted, Scotland came up again, lifting its beaches into the air.

When the rock of this big Utah roadcut had been the limy bottom of the Ordovician sea, the water had been so shallow that the lime mud had occasionally been above the surface and had dried out and cracked into chips, and then the water rose and the chips became embedded in more lime mud, and the process happened again and again so that the limestone now is a self-containing breccia studded with imprisoned chips—an accident so lovely to the eye you want to slice the rock and frame it.

Growing barley on his farm in Berwickshire, James Hutton had perceived slow destruction watching streams carry soil to the sea. It occurred to him that if streams were to do that through enough time, there would be no land on which to farm. So there must be in the world a source of new soil. It would come from above—that was to say, from high terrain—and be made by rain and frost slowly reducing mountains, which in stages would be ground down from boulders to cobbles to pebbles to sand to silt to mud by a ridge-to-ocean system of dendritic streams.

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.

What clearer evidence could we have had of the different formation of these rocks, and of the long interval which separated their formation, had we actually seen them emerging from the bosom of the deep? We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean.

Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.

So by looking at the paleomagnetic compasses in rock you can tell not only whether the magnetic pole was in the north or south when the rock formed but also—from the more subtle positions of the needles—the latitude of the rock at the time it formed.”
On the striated pavement of Algeria lies the till of polar glaciers. There are tropical atolls in Canada, tropical limestones in Siberia, tropical limestones in Antarctica. From fossils, from climates preserved in stone, such facts were known long before paleomagnetism was discovered; but they were, to say the least, imperfectly understood.

The Himalaya is the crowning achievement of the Indo-Australian Plate. India, in the Oligocene, crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed in under the newly created Tibetan Plateau and drove the Himalaya five and a half miles into the sky. Their height and volume are already so great they are beginning to melt in their own self-generated radioactive heat. When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had formed into rock.

The California Coast Ranges—the hills of Vallejo, the hills of San Simeon, the hills of San Francisco —are a kind of berm that was pushed up out of the water by the incoming plate, including large slices of the seafloor and a jumble of oceanic and continental materials known to geologists as the Franciscan mélange.

The huge body of sediment would one day be lifted far above sea level and dissected by weather and wrinkled into mountains in the way that the skin of an apple wrinkles as the apple grows old and dry.

In the nineteen-forties, a professor at Delft had written a book called The Pulse of the Earth, in which he asserted with mild cynicism that where gaps exist among the facts of geology the space between is often filled with things “geopoetical,” and now Hess, with good-humored candor, adopted the term and announced in his first paragraph that while he meant “not to travel any further into the realm of fantasy than is absolutely necessary,” he nonetheless looked upon what he was about to present as “an essay in geopoetry.”

“The whole ocean is virtually swept clean (replaced by new mantle material) every three hundred to four hundred million years,” he wrote, not then suspecting that ocean crust is actually consumed in half that time.

Where is the suture in California?’ of course, that there were at least three sutures. In each instance, a great island had closed up a sea and hit into America—just as India hit Tibet, just as Kodiak Island, which is a mini-India, is about to plow into Alaska. Fossils from the mid-Pacific have been found here in the West, and limestones that lithified a thousand miles south of the equator. Formations in California have alien fossils with cousins in the rock of New Guinea.

As a result, the style of geology is full of inferences, and they change. No one has ever seen a geosyncline. No one has ever seen the welding of tuff. No one has ever seen a granite batholith intrude.
...more

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Apr 29, 2020 André rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites-2020, favorites-all-time, 2020-ma

“The Himalaya is the crowning achievement of the vigorous Australian Plate, of which India is the northernmost extremity. India in the Oligocene, completing its long northward journey, crashed head on into Tibet, hit so hard that it not only folded and buckled the plate boundaries but also plowed in under the newly created Tibetan plateau and drove the Himalaya five and a half miles into the sky. The mountains are in some trouble. India has not stopped pushing them, and they are still going up. ...more

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Oct 18, 2018 Jeff Garrison rated it liked it

Shelves: geology, western-studies

Starting with an idea of traveling Interstate 80 from New York to San Francisco, John McPhee begins to explore the geology of America and the world. His search takes the reader deep into geology as well as the history of geology. What does New York's Palisades, Delaware Water's Gap, and Nevada's fault block mountains have in common? This book covers it!

The idea of range and basin as seen across the Great Basin (especially Nevada) is used as a laboratory to understand plate tectonics. It's intere ...more

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Jan 08, 2020 Jill rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2020reads

Poet about rocks.
This could be parts of a textbook except for that he refuses to diagram and chart and explains everything in language meant for feelings. I don’t know what dozens of the terms mean, but he gets it across anyway. Geology seems pretty mystical and he touches on that. Mostly I am swept up in thinking about mountains and drift and veins and plates and the fundamental smallness of humans. It’s great.

Mostly in this book: Nevada, the Basin and Range as a pattern for mountain making. H ...more

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Aug 09, 2020 Mitchell rated it liked it

Shelves: history, nonfiction, liked-reviews, science, library, geology

Tough book to read, especially the first third. Beautifully written, but I'm not sure the author had any intention of being well understood by the general public all the way through. And yet the first third especially is written as though for the general audience, but one who loves long words without knowing their meanings. The book becomes much more understandable as the author covers geologic periods and plate tectonics and even mining. Definitely not an introduction to geology, it barely cove ...more

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Nov 29, 2020 Bronson rated it really liked it

This one has been on my list for a while. Its a good book, pretty readable and a lot of interesting geology. Its written by a writer and not a scientist but it's still full of terms and science that I wish I had the capacity to retain. It's not too long and it gave me a better understanding of plate tectonics, geological age, mountain formation and the dynamic nature - albeit spread over hundreds of millions of years - of the earth. There were some interesting things about the Wasatch Range and ...more

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Dec 21, 2017 Scott Middleton rated it it was amazing

While mostly a book about rocks, this is the most engaging John McPhee outing I've read yet. He covers the "geopoetics" of the earth, the joys of roadtripping on I-80, and the dusty pace of life in Nevada's Basin and Range -- a region McPhee reveres almost as much as his native New Jersey. Amid long discourses on paleomagnetism, angular unconformities, and block faulting (perhaps a challenge for the impatient McPhee reader), he also delivers surprisingly absorbing tales of treasure hunting, Morm ...more

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Aug 09, 2017 Ted rated it liked it

This book is filled with signature McPhee writing. Concise, wise, measured. Great stuff. But I really struggled to get through this book. He has a way of using common language to describe quite technical and ungraspable concepts, so the end result is you just feel like you're going insane. I could grab 20 great paragraphs from this book, but I never want to look at the entirety ever again. ...more

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Jul 05, 2019 Dave rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book has absolutely everything I love about geology -- both the topic itself, but more importantly what geology means, the story it tells about the past, present, and future, and how geology is a kind of destiny. What we see growing and flowing depends on what's underneath it all, and where mankind plays out his life on the world depends upon what grows where.

The writing is so personal and so interesting. 6 stars on a scale of 1-5. ...more

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May 04, 2020 Caroline rated it it was amazing

"If by some fiat, I had to restrict this all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: the summit of Mt. Everest is made of marine limestone."

But I'm also going to have to make a tag for "read aloud, during Pandemic." ...more

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Aug 20, 2018 Claudia Putnam rated it really liked it

Shelves: journalistic-synthetic-non-fiction, science

Whew. I stopped reading this for a while, and when I restarted, I had to go back to the beginning, because I hadn't retained enough, even though maybe only a year, or less, had passed.

A glossary would have helped. Also maps, diagrams, and photos or at least illustrations. While someone else I know, a poet, who happened to be reading this book at the same time, reminded me of McPhee's statement that geology is one of the more poetic/metaphoric "languages," of the sciences--country rock, outwash Whew. I stopped reading this for a while, and when I restarted, I had to go back to the beginning, because I hadn't retained enough, even though maybe only a year, or less, had passed.

A glossary would have helped. Also maps, diagrams, and photos or at least illustrations. While someone else I know, a poet, who happened to be reading this book at the same time, reminded me of McPhee's statement that geology is one of the more poetic/metaphoric "languages," of the sciences--country rock, outwash plains, drowned rivers, orogeny, surface of no strain, angle of repose--McPhee also discusses how jargonistic it is. Eventually, as he says, "verbal deposits" thickened. "Someone developed enough effrontery to call a piece of our earth an epieugeosyncline. There were those who said interfluve when they meant between two streams, and perfectly good word like mesopotamian would do."

"A cactolith, according the American Geological Institutes Glossary of Geology and Related Sciences, was a 'quasi-horizontal chnolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths, whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thicken like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith."

So, okay, you see the problem of doing a deep-dive and then rendering this subject matter for the lay reader. Which is something McPhee is known for and normally excels at.

However, as the science became more differentiated, it also started making better distinctions—not much Andesite in the Andes, very little granite is actually granite, though most geologists go on calling it that in their everyday vernacular.

That is to say, you learn a lot in this book. What McPhee does particularly well is bring through a sort of astounded reverence and a sense of the deep silence you feel, especially in a place like Nevada, encountering the massive timescales. You really do come up against these in some places in the land, especially in the West. I remember reading Stegner, where he describes going east to college and how the land became progressively greener. You no longer could see or feel the earth, he said, mournfully. To my Eastern-born eyes, the West was alien, dry, boring, at first. I had to learn to see, but now the East is as horrifyingly bland as Stegner felt it to be. Covered, as Peter Brannen quoted a paleontologist saying in The Ends of the World, in “photosynthetic glop.” You can’t see anything.

Considering I dog-eared about every fourth page, you’d think I’d give this book 5 stars but I can’t, quite, because:

--I wanted to hear more about the female geologist he mentioned in the early part of the book—not because she’s female but because he made her sound so interesting and also led me to believe she’d be turning up later

--The book seemed to thin out later on, probably because it’s a series of magazine articles, and to become a little less about geology

--I didn’t understand how his friend was able to claim those tailing piles and I wanted to. I mean, a lot of time was spent on that endeavor, so I thought he might as well have explained how you go about striking a claim in these times.

I didn’t mind that he never tried to explain the UFO, because it was part of the holy mystery of the wide open spaces and missing time (the millions and I guess sometimes billions of years that disappear from the geological record in Nevada—all around me in Colorado 150 million years are missing). However, I looked it up and there was a test rocket launch at that moment in that area. Here’s a link… this guy is a little nuts but his explanation sounds about right. http://cpacker.org/misc/mcphee.html

Anyway, awesome read, highly recommended.
...more

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Oct 04, 2019 gwayle rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfic, favorites, american-west

I can't overstate how good of a writer John McPhee is. He never overdoes it; he never outstays his welcome. He doesn't pander, but he also keeps his explanations understandable for the generalist. This book is about the geology of the United States, about what has made the landscape the way it is, and how geologists have arrived at their current timelines and theories. McPhee follows several geologists who take him to various sites on or near I-80; he lingers at a few locations, but my favorite ...more

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Jun 21, 2014 Dave rated it really liked it · review of another edition


There was much to love about this book, but also
a few things that for me were mildly off-putting.

First, some things that resonated for me:

 • McPhee's passion for Nature & decoding
 some of its mysteries is, hopefully, contagious
 
 • Floating on the Great Salt Lake - water 
 so saline that only his shoulders, buttocks 
 and heels seemed to be wet. As if he were a 
 huge Water Strider, supported only by surface
 tension
 
 • Bishop Ussher and his "calculation" for 
 the age of the Earth - being off by a fa


There was much to love about this book, but also
a few things that for me were mildly off-putting.

First, some things that resonated for me:

 • McPhee's passion for Nature & decoding
 some of its mysteries is, hopefully, contagious
 
 • Floating on the Great Salt Lake - water 
 so saline that only his shoulders, buttocks 
 and heels seemed to be wet. As if he were a 
 huge Water Strider, supported only by surface
 tension
 
 • Bishop Ussher and his "calculation" for 
 the age of the Earth - being off by a factor
 of more than 700,000 gives new hope to all 
 innumerate people for success in life in
 spite of that failing ;-)
 
 • The story of James Hutton and the first
 appreciation of "deep time" - A biography of
 that remarkable man has to be well worth 
 reading
 
 • A grounding discussion of the vastness of
 time this planet has been in existence and how
 very tiny a portion and role we've played in 
 that drama
 
 • The sobering discussion of the two great 
 extinctions may add a bit of force to the 
 advice to carpe deum
 
 • The gradual acceptance of plate tectonics
 as a formative force of nature and all that 
 implies about the changing face of the Earth
 
All that and more make this book a must read, a 
small expenditure of time that will be well 
rewarded. Yet, there are a couple of minor 
quibbles that held me back to only 4 stars:

 • Why all the technical geological jargon
 sans footnotes or glossary to supply needed
 meaning? A glaring example is page 28 where 
 we see no less than 28 terms (rock types I 
 suppose, but what types?) These were words 
 that I could neither spell nor pronounce so
 they truly added nothing - so, to what purpose?
 
 • Some fairly complicated descriptions of
 the tortured processes that occur in creating
 the surface effects we live among, but not all
 of us are able to readily visualize such
 things - would a few photos or line drawings
 have been too much to expect?

...more

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Nov 02, 2016 Carin rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science, macmillan, nature

I have read eight books by John McPhee, no two on a remotely similar topic, and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. This one is probably the one where I understood the least, as plate tectonics isn't exactly a simple process to explain to lay people, but I enjoyed it anyway. I think in parts, he was just listing off cool names of things (types of rocks, eras of prehistory), just because they sound cool, not because he expected anyone to understand. Some bits almost read like poetry.

His books always ...more

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Mar 10, 2013 Chris rated it did not like it

Shelves: did-not-finish, pulitzer-non-fiction

This one was a disappointment. I was hoping this series of books would explain geology to a layperson, but it seems to be written with the assumption that the reader is already familiar with a vast number of terms. I am not quite sure who the intended audience is since it is probably too basic for those in the geology profession, but too difficult for the novice to understand. The emphasis was more on listing geological terms rather than to explain geological concepts.

The other aspect of this b ...more

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Nov 20, 2011 Josh Duggan rated it liked it

Whenever I am handed a book that someone tells me I should read, it feels like a homework assignment.

I am not in school.

I shouldn't have homework.

Moreover, there is a sort of immediacy to the required reading that tends to add stress to the equation, seeing as though the picture is colored by the act of lending.

This book was one of those situations in which a book was handed to me. To add to the reticence with which I undertook this task, the book's subject matter was field geology.

What's go ...more

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About John McPhee

John McPhee

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John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with the New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. The same year he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with FSG, and soon followed with The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The P ...more

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Quotes from Basin and Range

“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.” — 52 likes

“A million years is a short time - the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.” — 6 likes

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