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Rising from the Plains

(Annals of the Former World #3)

John McPhee

4.24 · Rating details · 1,617 ratings · 137 reviews

This is about high-country geology and a Rocky Mountain regional geologist. I raise that semaphore here at the start so no one will feel misled by an opening passage in which a slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist steps down from a train in Rawlins, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West.

So begins Joh ...more

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Paperback, 208 pages

Published November 1st 1987 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published November 17th 1986)

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Sep 24, 2017 Jennifer rated it really liked it

Shelves: science, non-fiction, pultizer, environment-nature, 2017

In Rising from the Plains, John McPhee takes us on an exciting and fascinating road trip throughout Wyoming with geologist David Love. The first half of the book is a beautiful blend of Wyoming geology, and the history of Love’s family as they move into the Wind River Basin region in the early twentieth century. The second half of the book continues with geology of the Rocky Mountain region, but also includes a high-level look at the United States and how it affected western geology.

I enjoyed Mc ...more

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Nov 20, 2020 Left Coast Justin rated it it was amazing

If you’re lucky, you’ve had the chance to get to know somebody truly inspirational, someone who just seems to belong to a different category of humanity than us normal folk. This book has three such people: A geologist named David Love; a frontier wife named Ethel Waxman; and of course the author himself, John McPhee. Arguably, the book is primarily about geology, but that’s a very limited interpretation. For many years, this was my favorite book, and re-reading it twenty years later, I realize If you’re lucky, you’ve had the chance to get to know somebody truly inspirational, someone who just seems to belong to a different category of humanity than us normal folk. This book has three such people: A geologist named David Love; a frontier wife named Ethel Waxman; and of course the author himself, John McPhee. Arguably, the book is primarily about geology, but that’s a very limited interpretation. For many years, this was my favorite book, and re-reading it twenty years later, I realize I was right: This is marvelous.

McPhee has made a career of writing about interesting, highly-accomplished people. What sets this book apart is love – he really seems to love the people he’s profiling. (While this is blatantly obvious in the text, be assured I’m not making this up – he stated as much in an interview.) What can be more pleasurable than reading a brilliant writer writing about people he loves and admires?

McPhee got his hands on the unpublished diaries of a young woman who made a life for herself in the emerging state of Wyoming in the early 1900’s, and it’s riveting reading. Miss Waxman is an impressive example of humanity – top of her class at Wellesley, an excellent horsewoman, she became a schoolteacher – the only schoolteacher, in fact – in Fremont County, Wyoming in 1905. (Fremont County is about the size of New Hampshire, and she had only a dozen students, some of whom had a three-hour commute by horse.) Women were so scarce in the region that a stranger found a glove she’d dropped on the prairie twenty miles from her ranchhouse, but quickly figured out who the owner must be and returned it. David Love was a down-to-earth guy (literally -- he slept outdoors about 1/4 of his life, given the nature of his work.) He also knew more about Rocky Mountain earth science than anybody living back then, probably, and is a good explainer.

So many “romantic” books are all about the period leading up to a marriage…Having now been married myself for twenty-six years, having raised a family, I think romance in the decades after the wedding has been given short shrift in literature. But the story told here is full of romantic touches, in the broader sense of the term. Here’s Ethel writing about an outing with her two sons, after harvesting wild hay:

My husband liked to have me ride with them for the last load. Sometimes I held the reins and cried, “Whoa, Dan!” while the men pitched up the hay. Then while the wagon swayed slowly back over the uneven road, I lay nestled deeply between my sons in the fragrant hay. The billowy white clouds moving across the wide blue sky were close, so close, it seemed there was nothing else in the universe but clouds and hay.

Of course, not every day on the ranch was this calm. Working with large animals always carries the potential for danger:

“The bull broke into the high granary," wrote Waxman. "Our only, and small, supply of horse and chicken feed was there. Foolishly, I went in after him and drove him down the steps…” The bull actually charged her in the granary and came close to crushing her against the back wall. She confused it, sweeping its eyes with a broom. It probably would have killed her, though, had it not stepped on a weak plank, which snapped. The animal panicked and turned for the door. (In decades to follow, her husband never fixed the plank.)

Spending time with the characters in this book is quite simply a joy. Even better that they aren’t fictional, and there are people alive today who remember these folks and call them"grandma" and “grandpa”.

Of course, there’s a great deal about geology here as well. The book is set almost entirely in Wyoming, which has long been my bolt-hole when I grow tired of civilization. If you’re at all interested in Mother Earth, there’s something of interest in every corner of the state, and this book provides a thorough and illuminating overview. It just so happens that Wyoming is a perfect place to study just about every geologic process known, and Grand Teton National Park contains the most complete and complex geologic record of any place in North America. At the time this book was written, the exact process by which the Rocky Mountains arose was still a substantial mystery, an odd puzzle among the world’s mountain ranges. Maybe geologists have figured it out since then, but unless we come up with another science writer of McPhee’s caliber to explain it, I don't wanna hear it. ...more

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Nov 29, 2013 Darwin8u rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2013

''Most maps are patched together from various papers and reports. Dave has looked at all the rock. It's all in one mind. Most geologic maps are maps of time, not rocks."
-- Malcolm McKenna, quoted in John McPhee's Rising from the Plains

description

I am nearly finished with the individual portions of Annals of the Former World (Basin and Range ☑, In Suspect Terrain ☑, Assembling California ☑). All I have left is to read the section 'Crossing the Craton' (a forty-page addition to his 40th parallel/I-80 project that filled in the blank in the map and allowed the publishers of 'Annals of the Former World' some additional McPhee text not found in the four main books/sections previously published to incentivize McPhee's fans to fork out the addtional $35 in 1998 to get the whole brilliant McPhee mess).

I read these books a little out of order over a little over the last year. I started off well with 'Basin & Range', 'In Suspect Terrain', but then jumped to 'Assembling California' since a couple of weeks ago I was going to be driving through California and figured it would be nice to have some geology of the geography I was going to be driving through next to me.

While I was a little disappointed with 'Assembling California', I loved 'Rising from the Plains'. I don't know if it was a return to my roots (Wyoming and Snake River and Mormon Country), or the fact that this book seemed just to excite McPhee more. You could tell he loved the Loves (David Love: Yale educated geologist, cowboy; John Love: David's father, mirthful Scot rancher/cowboy, nephew of John Muir; Ethel Waxham Love: David's mother, teacher, writer). He threads this family's golden personality and history with the geology and geography of Wyoming.

These books are dangerous and should not be given to children. I am keeping them locked up with my William S. Burroughs, Henry Miller, etc. If my son or daughter (no field geology sexist me) were to discover these McPhee books too young (s)he might just grow up to be a passionate field geologist. Reading this as I near my 40s, McPhee almost makes me want to take up a hammer, hop on a horse, and ride into the mountains.

I give it four stars, simply because 'Coming into the Country' still exists for me as a slightly better book, but I think the combined energy of all of the 'Annals' is definitely amazing. ...more

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Jan 07, 2009 Clay rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

This book was phenomenal.
It is a must read for anyone interested in Rocky Mountain geology, or in getting a glimpse into the American west.

This book has been republished in McPhee's larger Annals of a Former World. It is a biography of the famous Wyoming geologist, J. David Love. But it also gives a beautiful overview of the geology of Wyoming through Love's eyes.

Some of the geology is a bit outdated, but it does not distract from the greater good. ...more

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Oct 08, 2011 Joyce rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, geology

This is the third time I've read Rising from the Plains and it seems as fresh today as when I first read it for a geology class back in the mid-90's. John McPhee, who wrote for the The New York Times for many years, is an engaging writer and in this book weaves the geology of the high plains with the story of famed Rocky Mountain geologist David Love and his family, who settled in central Wyoming in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Having lived in Wyoming myself, I am familiar with the ...more

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Sep 17, 2018 Judy rated it liked it

Shelves: sci-env-natlhx-nf-f, us-mont-wyo

Western history, memoir, geography, and of course, geology. All mixed into one relatively slim volume. People who have vivid mental maps of Wyoming, and have driven I-80 (preferably many times) will be the most avid readers. As I read, I kept wondering why the author/publisher didn't use illustrations. Verbal descriptions of geologic features aren't nearly as instructive as one good drawing. There is a map, but it's pretty general.

Another criticism -- there isn't an Index, which is an omission I ...more

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Jun 29, 2021 David Kessler rated it it was amazing

McPhee at his best. The author mixes geology, history and humans into a tightly woven story.
Wyoming could not be more alive than in this story about the early 20th century settlers.
John Love settled at the epicenter of Wyoming and has two sons and a daughter. His son, David Love, took up geology of Wyoming in a large way and his observations and tact are the center of McPhee's writing. A well-spun yarn. ...more

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Jul 19, 2017 Bob R Bogle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

While studying general Wyoming history I learned by happy happenstance of John McPhee's 1986 book Rising From the Plains, which unfolds the geological story of the state from the perspective of those American Western pioneers and their descendants who have inhabited the land for the last century. Wyoming geologist David Love is McPhee's focal point. It's challenging to pin down this book. It's a portrait of Wyoming's geology, but also of David Love and his family, and occasionally it's more free ...more

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Nov 03, 2016 Natalie rated it did not like it

Mind-numbingly abstruse. I don't see how anyone who is not in the geology field could find this book remotely accessible. Maybe I just lack the intellectual curiosity or capacity for this book. Or maybe it's just a slog of a book that few regular folks would find appealing. ...more

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Oct 10, 2020 Cheryl rated it it was amazing

“Had this been a May morning a hundred million years ago, in Cretaceous time, we would have been many fathoms underwater, in a broad arm of the sea, which covered the continental platform—reached across the North American craton, the Stable Interior Craton—from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean where vegetation flourished in coastal swamps. They would have been like the Florida Everglades, the peat fens of East Anglia, or borders of the Java Sea, which stand just as temporarily, reported to ...more

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Jun 19, 2018 Paul rated it liked it

Shelves: microhistory, science, audiobooks, nonfiction

With the last two Annals of the Former World books, it's become somewhat more obvious that these books are as much the story of of specific geologists as they are of the geology itself. This book spends a lot more time on the life of David Love and his parents than it does on the actual geology itself.

I suppose I should be disappointed by the bait-and-switch as I was with Our Senses , but I think the difference is that I wasn't reading this book because I was super interested in plains geolog ...more

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Jan 28, 2019 Margaret rated it really liked it

Shelves: usa-nonfiction

Another excellent book by John McPhee. This is about geology, specifically Wyoming geology, but it's also about David Love, an apparently legendary geologist. I say apparently because I don't know anything about geology. Much of the book went over my head. But within the story of Wyoming's geology is the story of David Love and his family - his parents' courtship and marriage, his childhood and college years, his love for his home state, the tension he felt between his environmentalism and his d ...more

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Feb 09, 2022 Nora Rawn rated it liked it

I went back and forth on this. It's quite quite hard to comprehend the motions over time just by their nature and the extremity of the changes; but I was gripped by the story of the Wyoming-bound schoolteacher from her journals. What really sticks out, of course, is the geologist-explorer at the center, who thinks exploiting resources is his purpose but starts to have some hesitations that of course now we can see are glimmers of the unsustainable truth. ...more

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Jan 15, 2020 Jill rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2020reads

This one is about Wyoming. The Love family geologists, Scottish stubborn survivalists, living rough and ranching. Jackson Hole and how it formed, how the Rockies got exhumed, how oil and uranium were unexpectedly found in Wyoming’s basins. Also the theory of hot spots, how plates move over them to form island chains, and how the deep theory works until it is / isn’t proven. Also some reflections on office vs field geology, and how one might regret a uranium gold rush in your childhood backyard & ...more

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May 22, 2020 Books I'm Not Reading rated it really liked it

Shelves: wy-mt-west, non-fiction, curious-adventure

Oh, this book was very close to being a 5-star read, but McPhee just got too technical for a novice like me toward the end. Still, I feel blessed to have read this book and the McPhee cared enough about the state I live in to spend the time to write it. For anyone who loves Wyoming or loves geology or both!

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Nov 24, 2021 André rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: z202122-ca

“In short, he had put the petals back on the flower. And it was some flower. The Teton landscape contained not only the most complete geologic history in North America but also the most complex. (“One reason I’ve put in a part of my life here is that we have so much coming together. I don’t want to waste my time. I can make more of a contribution by concentrating here than on any other place.”) After more than half a century with the story assembling in his mind, he can roll it like a Roman scro “In short, he had put the petals back on the flower. And it was some flower. The Teton landscape contained not only the most complete geologic history in North America but also the most complex. (“One reason I’ve put in a part of my life here is that we have so much coming together. I don’t want to waste my time. I can make more of a contribution by concentrating here than on any other place.”) After more than half a century with the story assembling in his mind, he can roll it like a Roman scroll. From the Precambrian beginnings, he can watch the landscape change, see it move, grow, collapse, and shuffle itself in an intricate, imbricate manner, not in spatial chaos but by cause and effect through time. He can see it in motion now, in several ways responsively moving in the present—its appearance indebted to the paradox that while the region generally appears to have been rising the valley has collapsed.

Splitting the wall of the Tetons is a diabase dike a hundred and fifty feet wide, running like a dark streak of warpaint straight up the face of the mountains. Diabase: a brother of gabbro, a distant relative of granite. Four miles below the surface of the earth, the space occupied by this now solid dike was once a fissure through which the dark rock flowed upward as magma. At the same point in the narrative—1.3 billion years before the present, in the age of the Precambrian called Helikian time—marine beaches are not far to the west, and beyond them is a modest continental shelf. There is no Oregon, no Washington, not much Idaho—instead, blue ocean over ocean crust. Down toward the beaches flow sluggish rivers across a featureless plain. Folded and faulted schists and gneisses are bevelled under the plain, preserving in their deformation compressive crustal movements that have long since driven skyward uncounted ranges that have worn away. The Helikian beaches in their turn disappear, in burial becoming sandstone, which in the heat and pressure of more folding mountains is altered to quartzite. The mountains dissolve, and still another quiet plain vanishes below waves. The water advances into this piece of the world that will one day form as Jackson Hole. It lies close to the latitude of Holocene Sri Lanka—or Malaya, or Panama—and is moving toward the equator. The water is warm but not always quiet or clear. Blue-green algae build mounds in the shallows. There is a drop in sea level. Polygonal mud cracks become ceramic in the tropical sun. The sea returns. The water is virtually transparent, and the skeletons of billions of creatures form a pure blue-gray limestone. Like Debussy’s engulfed cathedral, the site comes up now and again into the light and air, but for the most part seas stay over it. Sands accumulate—broad, deep sands—but they preserve almost no fossil record, so not even David Love will ever say with certainty whether they are underwater or out in the air. (What he cannot say with certainty he will readily say without certainty, provided the difference is clear. He prefers not to be, as he likes to put it, “a man walking with one foot on each side of a fence.” He thinks that some of those sands were terrestrial dunes and coastlines, reddened as oxides in the air.) Jackson Hole is close to the equator, and phosphates form in the shallow evaporating sea. Tidal flats appear—wide red flats, thickened by slow rivers coming from an uplift far to the east. In the muds are small tracks and tiny bones of dinosaurs. Rapidly—and possibly as a result of the breaking up of the earth’s only continent—the region travels north, moving about a thousand miles in thirty million years. Big dunes form upon the flats: dry, windblown dunes—a Sahara in salmon and red, at the precise latitudes of the modern Sahara. The red sands in turn are covered by the Sundance Sea. Coming from the north, it not only buries the big dunes under mud and sand but covers them with galaxies of clams. When the water drops, floodplains emerge, and flooding rivers band the country—pink, purple, red, and green. Dinosaurs wander this chromatic landscape—a dinosaur as large as a corgi, a dinosaur as large as a bear, a dinosaur larger than a Trailways bus. Seas return, filled with a viciousness of life. Black and gray sediments pour into them from stratovolcanoes off to the west. In these times, the piece of sea bottom which is the future site of Jackson Hole overshoots the latitude of modern Wyoming and continues north to a kind of apogee near modern Saskatoon.

The land arches. Deep miles of sediments lying over schists and granites rise and bend. The seas drain eastward. The dinosaurs fade. Mountains rise northwest, rooted firmly to their Precambrian cores. Braided rivers descend from them, lugging quartzite boulders, and spreading fields of gold-bearing gravel tens of miles wide. Other mountains—as rootless sheets of rock—appear in the west, sliding like floorboards, overlapping, stacking up, covering younger rock, colliding with the rooted mountains, while to the east more big ranges and huge downflexing basins appear in the random geometries of the Laramide Revolution.

For all that is going on around it, the amount of activity at the site of Jackson Hole is relatively low. Across the future valley runs a northwest-trending hump that might be the beginnings of a big range but is destined not to become one. Miles below, however, a great fault develops among the Precambrian granites, amphibolites, gneisses, and schists—and a crustal block moves upward at least two thousand feet, stopping, for the time being, far below the surface.

New volcanoes rise to the north and east. Fissures spread open. Materials ranging from viscous lavas to flying ash obliterate the existing topography. Streams disintegrate these materials and rearrange them in layers a few miles away. So far, these scenes—each one of which is preserved in the rock of Jackson Hole—have advanced to a point that is 99.8 per cent of the way through the history of the earth, yet nothing is in sight that even vaguely resembles the Tetons. The Precambrian rock remains buried under younger sediments. At the surface is a country of undramatic hills. The movements that brought the Overthrust Belt to western Wyoming—and caused the more easterly ranges to leap up out of the ground—have all been compressional: crust driven against crust, folded, faulted, and otherwise deformed. Now the crust extends, the earth stretches, the land pulls apart—and one result is a north-south-trending normal fault, fifty miles long. On the two sides of this fault, blocks of country swing on distant hinges like a facing pair of trapdoors—one rising, one sagging. The rising side is the rock of the nascent Tetons, carrying upward on its back the stratified deposits of half a billion years. One after another, erosion shucks them off. Even more rapidly, the east side falls—into a growing void. Magma, in motion below, is continually being drawn toward volcanoes, vents, and fissures to the north. Just as magma moving under Idaho is causing land to collapse and form the Snake River Plain, magma drawn north from this place is increasing the vacuity of Jackson Hole. As the magma reaches Yellowstone, it rises to the surface, spreads out in all directions, and in a fiery cloud rolls down from Yellowstone to bury the north end of the Tetons, where it splits and flows along both sides. The descending valley floor breaks into blocks, like ice cubes in a bucket of water. Some of them stick up as buttes. A lake now fills the valley—shallow, forty miles long—and in it forms a limestone so white it looks like snow. There are white shales as well, and water-laid strata of white volcanic ash. As these sediments thicken to a depth approaching six thousand feet, the lake that rests upon them is always shallow, and full of freshwater clams and snails, and some beavers and aquatic mice. While the lake is accepting sediment, the bottom of its bottom is sinking at the same rate. With a loud terminal hissing, lavas flowing down from Yellowstone cool in the lake as obsidian. Fiery billows of sticky fog come down the valley as well. It cools as tuff. The big lake vanishes. In successive earthquakes, there is more valley faulting, damming the valley streams to form deep narrow lakes, which appear suddenly and as quickly go. Off the fast-rising block of mountains, erosion has by now removed fifteen thousand feet of layered sediments, and the Precambrian granites—with their attendant amphibolites, schists, and gneisses, and a vertical streak of diabase—are the highest rock below the sky. Bent upward against the flanks of the Precambrian are the broken-off strata of the Paleozoic era, and the broken-off strata of the Mesozoic era—serrated, ragged hogbacks, continually pushed aside. Perched on the granite at the skyline is a bit of Cambrian sandstone that the weather has yet to take away. On the opposite side of the Teton Fault, the same sandstone lies beneath the valley. The vertical distance between the two sides of this once contiguous formation is thirty thousand feet.

That brings the chronicle essentially to the present, but still the blockish mountains look more like hips than breasts. Now off the Absarokas, off the Wind Rivers, off the central Yellowstone Plateau—and, to a lesser extent, down the canyons of the Tetons—comes a thousand cubic miles of ice. A coalesced glacier more than half a mile thick enters and plows the valley. The west side of this glacier scrapes along the Tetons above the level of the modern timberline. Melting away, the glacier leaves a barren ground of boulders. More ice comes—a lesser but not insignificant volume—and a third episode, which is smaller still. The ice cuts headward up canyons into the mountains, making cirques. As rings of cirques further erode, they form the spires known as horns. The ice signs the valley with lakes, and as it shrinks back into the mountains human beings have come to watch it go. Long after it is gone, the valley floor, continuing to be unstable as magmas are drawn north from below, drops even more. Big spruce go down with it—trees with diameters of five feet—and are enveloped by the water of Jenny Lake. The mountains jump upward at the same time, many feet in a few seconds near the end of the fourteenth century, emphasizing the fact that they are active in our time. In 1925, seventy-five million tons of rock fall into the Gros Ventre River. In 1983, the year that the trees are discovered at the bottom of Jenny Lake, an earthquake halfway up the Richter scale rumbles through Jackson Hole.”

Notes: Simply astonishing. Not only a flawless example of narrative nonfiction, but a terrific western, too. ...more

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Jun 27, 2020 cartercam rated it liked it

Very interesting account of the geology of Wyoming! I really enjoyed all the facts, like why the Wyoming rivers have strange paths, and how Union Pacific got a leg up due to a route in Wyoming, and why people in Pinedale have accelerated tooth decay. I love geology because it literally underlies everything, and this book highlighted that.

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Jun 07, 2020 James added it

Shelves: abandoned

I'm just never going to be able to get through the geology series. ...more

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Oct 14, 2018 Trish Remley rated it really liked it

Book read for a Place Based Literature Action Book Club. A good combo of geology and learning about someone's upbringing and subsequent life's work in this geology. Could not be more Placed Based. Author drives around Wyoming with Geologist David Love (1913-2002) - one of the last great field geologists. David was born near Riverton Wyoming. His parents, John & Miss Waxman built up and lost everything several times due to blizzard, flood, drought.Lived very rural. David mentions his childhood ne ...more

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Jan 10, 2016 Joyce added it · review of another edition

I finished this entire book about the origin of the Rocky Mountains before realizing that I still don't have much idea how they were made! Partly that is because McPhee's geological exegesis is interspersed with the details of geologist David Love's family history -- which turns out to be a combination of _The Virginian_ and _Little House on the Prairie_. Let me put it this way: in a work about the geology of the western United States, the fact that John Muir was Love's great-uncle barely has ro ...more

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Jul 20, 2013 Steve rated it really liked it

One of 5 volumes of geology with a personal twist that McPhee has written. I have not read McPhee in so long - glad to get back to him.
This is the story of the geology of Wyoming - and a fascinating story it is! McPhee gives it that personal note by telling us the story of the Love family and traveling w/ geologist David Love. His mother was a Wellesley grad who came to WY to teach in a one room schoolhouse, and was wooed by cowboy John Love. The journals of his mother, Ethel Waxman Love, have ...more

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May 18, 2012 Miriam rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2012, best-of-2012

I read this as we travelled up from Scottsdale through Flagstaff, by the Grand Canyon (we did stop to gawk), through Monument Valley and the Valley of the Gods, over the pass at Butte as it snowed (roads to Yellowstone were closed because of snow), and I finished it today as we drove around the edges of the Black Hills (Theodore Roosevelt National Park). A perfect read for a rather glorious car trip.

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Feb 14, 2013 Virginia rated it liked it

I love John McPhee's writing, especially when he is describing people and places. Toward the end of this book, the in-depth description of the chaotic geologic layers of Wyoming basins and ranges left me leafing through pages rather than reading them. So truth is I am not a geologist but love to scuttle around the edges of geologic formations. I did recommend that my Wyoming son read this book. ...more

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Oct 12, 2010 Susan Herceg-russo rated it did not like it

I am having the most difficult time reading this book. I'm not an unintelligent person, but the subject matter is not grabbing me.

What attitude is one supposed to take to connect with these men? I'm not finding it. Someone please help. ...more

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Oct 21, 2011 Jessica rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nature-science, favorites

Given that my love for geology started in Wyoming, this book is one I will lug around with me for life. Wonderful history of David Love and his family, his geological career working in various industries, and his conflicting feelings on some of the work he is asked to do.

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Feb 23, 2018 Isaac Jensen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction

It’s hard to pick a favorite from Annals of the Former World, but I think that this book may take the cake.

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Dec 01, 2020 Dave Mills rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Wyoming's full of ignorant people. We've thousands of cowboys who wear their Stetsons and brag of their toughness but who could never make it on the range and who probably don't even know how to saddle a horse. We've ranchers who hate the government but bellyache when their (over)grazing allotment checks arrive late. We've old, white, male politicians who scam the system for their own greed but who have little sympathy for the downtrodden, those without health insurance, for example. These same ...more

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Jun 20, 2021 Mary rated it liked it

When I read John McPhee’s writing, I am drawn in by his curiosity and his love for his subjects. Reading this book I fell in love with Wyoming, again; for geology, my major in college; and with Ethel Waxham, a highly educated young woman at the beginning of the 20th century, and her son the geologist. And then I found myself learning about hotspots, the Canadian Shield and seamounts off the eastern seaboard.
This book was first published in 1987 and is one of the books in the collection Annals of ...more

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Feb 06, 2020 Francis Kilkenny rated it it was amazing

John McPhee is truly a unique and special author. The nonfiction books that were eventually bound into the tome “Annals of a Former World” comprise his magnum opus. “Rising From the Plains” is one of those books. It follows the geologist David Love across Wyoming, and describes history both geologic and human. Love is fascinating and conflicted, with a character and background that could be written into a novel. Love’s mother and father are also described in this book, which helps to root the qu ...more

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Jun 06, 2019 Ian rated it it was ok

You have to be really passionate about the geography of Wyoming, and also love anecdotes about 19th century frontier life in Wyoming to truly enjoy this. You also need to have at least a basic understanding of geological fundamentals or be prepared to look up a lot of terminology along the way.

The book is basically a "travels with Charlie" travelogue where "Charlie" is not a canine companion, but David Love, an old school salt of the earth cowboy geologist who leads our narrator around to miscel ...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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“This is the only place in the whole Rocky Mountain front where you can go from the Great Plains to the summit of the mountains without snaking your way up a mountain face or going through a tunnel. This one feature had more to do with the building of the West than any other factor. I don’t diminish the importance of the Oregon Trail, but here you had everything going for you. This point hasn’t been made before.” — 0 likes

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