What do you think?
Rate this book
Annals of the Former World #4
Assembling California
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect--in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth--and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California.
McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.
In 1978 and 1979, John McPhee also began his wider series of related journeys, traversing North America at about the fourtieth parallel, using roadcuts of Interstate 80 as windows into regional geologies, and incidentally profiling the lives of the geologists with whom he traveled. A continental tetrology, gathering under the title Annals of the Former World, began with Basin and Range (1980), and continued with In Susect Terrain (1982) and Rising from the Plains (1986), and is now completed by Assembling California. In the overall structure of these compositions, the controlling element has been not a simple geographic itinerary but a set of thematic jumps from place to place in the light of the theory of plate tectonics, which, when the author began, with only ten years old.
McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.
In 1978 and 1979, John McPhee also began his wider series of related journeys, traversing North America at about the fourtieth parallel, using roadcuts of Interstate 80 as windows into regional geologies, and incidentally profiling the lives of the geologists with whom he traveled. A continental tetrology, gathering under the title Annals of the Former World, began with Basin and Range (1980), and continued with In Susect Terrain (1982) and Rising from the Plains (1986), and is now completed by Assembling California. In the overall structure of these compositions, the controlling element has been not a simple geographic itinerary but a set of thematic jumps from place to place in the light of the theory of plate tectonics, which, when the author began, with only ten years old.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1992
211 people are currently reading
2580 people want to read
About the author
John McPhee
132 books1,851 followersJohn Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books, including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 214 reviews
April 27, 2024
“The two time scales—the one human and emotional, the other geologic—are so disparate. But a sense of geologic time is the most important thing to get across to the non-geologist: the slow rate of geologic processes—centimetres per year—with huge effects if continued for enough years. A million years is a small number on the geologic time scale, while human experience is truly fleeting—all human experience, from its beginning, not just one lifetime. Only occasionally do the two time scales coincide.”
I absolutely love how well John McPhee does the intersection of human and geologic time scales in his Annals of the Former World geology books, making them about creation of continents how we know them while managing to bring people, despite their incredibly short timespans, into focus as well. McPhee is really great that way, and all of his books I’ve read so far are both wonderfully informative and just simply wonderful.
California, as McPhee tells us, was assembled as a result of collisions of a bunch of migrating islands coming up from the ocean floor, and of course now is shaking at the seams between them — those seismic faults on top of which we unknowingly built homes and businesses and university football stadiums. His description of Loma Prieta 1989 earthquake is enough to start doubting the good judgment of anyone living in earthquake country — but when has it ever stopped any of us?
“Where California has come to be, there was only blue sea reaching down some miles to ocean-crustal rock, which was moving, as it does, into subduction zones to be consumed. Ocean floors with an aggregate area many times the size of the present Pacific were made at spreading centers, moved around the curve of the earth, and melted in trenches before there ever was so much as a kilogram of California. Then, a piece at a time—according to present theory—parts began to assemble. An island arc here, a piece of a continent there—a Japan at a time, a New Zealand, a Madagascar—came crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered. Baja is about to detach. A great deal more may go with it. Some parts of California arrived head on, and others came sliding in on transform faults, in the manner of that Sierra granite west of the San Andreas.”
McPhee, as usual, travels through his chosen geographic area in a company of an actual geologist — the time it’s Eldridge Moores from University of California Davis. Together they traverse California from the Sierra Nevada to the Central Valley and follow the San Andreas fault through the San Francisco Bay Area, with the narration frequently taking a detour to the other parts of the world - India, Australia, the other parts of the US, etc. Earthquake stories and Gold Rush chronicles alternating with geology and plate tectonics made for a fascinating although a bit meandering mix, with McPhee’s descriptions being vivid enough to stick into my memory better than the visuals ever could.
Oh, and ophiolites. That’s the word of the month for me. Thanks, McPhee! My geological vocabulary has been notably expanded.
5 stars.
——————
Also posted on my blog.
March 9, 2021
When I learned a few years ago that plate tectonics, the theory that the form of the earth's surface is created by rigid plates moving over the mantle, colliding with one another and pulling apart, was actually quite new, I was startled. As I had seen it explained on PBS documentaries it seemed so obvious that I assumed it was an idea that had been around for a very long time, not just since the 1960's.
And so my eye was caught by this book when I went looking for something written by John McPhee in audio format. Although McPhee's primary focus is the state of California, his discussions with his guide, tectonicist Eldridge Moores, cover the formation of current and previous continents all over the globe. [Aside: Plate tectonics grew out of the idea of continental drift, the theory that there was once just a single continent ("Pangea"), first posited by German scientist Alfred Wegener in the early 20th century. When reading about this I found myself thinking about another German, Alexander von Humboldt, who proposed nearly a hundred years earlier that Africa and South America must once have been connected given not only the "fit" of the two continents, but the similarities of plant life in the areas that would have been adjoined.]
The story of the geological evidence of the land masses that collided, moved under, moved over, and separated to create the area we know as California truly is fascinating, and McPhee is an excellent story teller. This book is the last in a four part series Annals of the Former World, a geographical cross section of North America, for which McPhee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, a richly deserved honor.
My only reservation with the book is purely my own. I should have been more patient and waited until I could find the time to read it in print, rather than to listen. It was far too easy for me to become confused by geological terms and have to re-read to make sure I understood, or to Google words I wasn't sure I heard clearly. None of this should be charged again McPhee! My next venture into his writing will be in print.
And so my eye was caught by this book when I went looking for something written by John McPhee in audio format. Although McPhee's primary focus is the state of California, his discussions with his guide, tectonicist Eldridge Moores, cover the formation of current and previous continents all over the globe. [Aside: Plate tectonics grew out of the idea of continental drift, the theory that there was once just a single continent ("Pangea"), first posited by German scientist Alfred Wegener in the early 20th century. When reading about this I found myself thinking about another German, Alexander von Humboldt, who proposed nearly a hundred years earlier that Africa and South America must once have been connected given not only the "fit" of the two continents, but the similarities of plant life in the areas that would have been adjoined.]
The story of the geological evidence of the land masses that collided, moved under, moved over, and separated to create the area we know as California truly is fascinating, and McPhee is an excellent story teller. This book is the last in a four part series Annals of the Former World, a geographical cross section of North America, for which McPhee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, a richly deserved honor.
My only reservation with the book is purely my own. I should have been more patient and waited until I could find the time to read it in print, rather than to listen. It was far too easy for me to become confused by geological terms and have to re-read to make sure I understood, or to Google words I wasn't sure I heard clearly. None of this should be charged again McPhee! My next venture into his writing will be in print.
October 6, 2017
I'm fascinated with scientific topics that are written is if they weren't. This is particularly commendable when the writer is a scientist first and foremost. Three that spring immediatley to mind: Aldo Leopold (probably my favorite non-fiction book ever is the Sand County Almanac), Rachel Carson, and Stephen Jay Gould. John McPhee's writing often fits in with these in my mind, simply because his writing is engaging and pulls you right into the topic he's writing about.
In this case, it's geology. I've always been fascinated by geology, and I've read McPhee before, so this was an irresistible book for me. McPhee did not disappointment me. He moves from geologic description to narrative writing so smoothly that I often didn't notice the transition. The book is highly educational, going into great detail on plate tectonics and geologic formations. One section in particular, in the Sierra Nevada mountains (which I know fairly well), was truly magnificent. The types of earth and rock were not only described, but explained as to how they were formed and their role in the overall topography of the region.
McPhee is one of those few non-fiction writers who engages readers in a way that makes the read feel just as action-packed and riveting as a good novel. In a sense, that stands to reason, since Assembling California is the story of geologic California.
And what a fantastic title!
In this case, it's geology. I've always been fascinated by geology, and I've read McPhee before, so this was an irresistible book for me. McPhee did not disappointment me. He moves from geologic description to narrative writing so smoothly that I often didn't notice the transition. The book is highly educational, going into great detail on plate tectonics and geologic formations. One section in particular, in the Sierra Nevada mountains (which I know fairly well), was truly magnificent. The types of earth and rock were not only described, but explained as to how they were formed and their role in the overall topography of the region.
McPhee is one of those few non-fiction writers who engages readers in a way that makes the read feel just as action-packed and riveting as a good novel. In a sense, that stands to reason, since Assembling California is the story of geologic California.
And what a fantastic title!
November 26, 2021
Yes, this is a book about rocks, but McPhee's prose is so supple and evocative it's hard to find fault (see what I did there? I'll show myself out). He braids together human and geological history with wit, elegance, and a charmingly vast vocabulary. Would recommend to anyone with an interest in science, writing, or Spaceship Earth.
May 31, 2018
California's geology is incredibly complex -- and, frankly, frightening! John McPhee traveled the country and the world with geologist Eldridge Moores to understand it. Like the three preceding books in the Annals of the Former World series, this volume is packed with fascinating and astonishing historical tales and scientific insight poetically expressed, but this extra-long volume needed an editor to whittle down and organize the unwieldy amount of detail. I generally like meandering books with lots of detail but here the readability suffered. That being said, the stories of the Gold Rush and the earthquakes of the San Andreas fault were unforgettable. Though whether it's crazier to live in earthquake alley or tornado alley (where I currently live) is an open question.
May 18, 2009
Assembling California was written for laymen (laypeople?), but I beg to differ. Chock full of geology terms, it needs both a glossary and an index. I gave it a high rating, though, because it is fascinating. If you live in the Bay Area, and are at all interested in your surroundings, read it. Take it with you when you drive to Tahoe or Reno and have the non-driver read parts of it aloud. Same when you go to Napa and to Mount Diablo. Instead of driving 80 back from Tahoe, get off and wind through the country to 505.
McPhee's writing is a tad bizarre, but in a good way.
Feel free to skim. I did (and Bob did, too), but you'll be glued to the other parts.
Right after finishing, I picked up The Crack at the Edge of the World (thanks, Hank!). Many similarities (but more specifically on the 1906 SF earthquake). Simon Winchester is a better writer and this one, so far, is riveting.
McPhee's writing is a tad bizarre, but in a good way.
Feel free to skim. I did (and Bob did, too), but you'll be glued to the other parts.
Right after finishing, I picked up The Crack at the Edge of the World (thanks, Hank!). Many similarities (but more specifically on the 1906 SF earthquake). Simon Winchester is a better writer and this one, so far, is riveting.
December 5, 2024
I kept thinking to myself that this book is way more interesting than it should be. Absolutely excellent—this reinforced my belief in the craft of writing. I will happily read any book I find by John McPhee.
February 17, 2023
There is a ton of information in this book about the geology of California, much that was new to me and far more than I will retain. Mr. McPhee covers the formation and change over geologic time of the Sierras, the Central Valley, the Coast Range, the San Andreas Fault and more. He also covers gold mining and earthquakes. There is a lot of discussion of plate tectonics and descriptions of how the movements of the tectonic plates have created our mountains, valleys, faults, volcanoes and other physical features. There is much technical terminology that is not so easy to remember for someone like me who knows next to nothing about geology. I stayed away from earth science and geology in both high school and college. That stuff was Rocks for Jocks, not the cool sciences like physics and chemistry that were better for a bright boy like me. I'm afraid I missed out because I came to this book not knowing ophiolite from serpentine. It would been much easier going if I had had a little more backgroud, but still the book is ultimately simple enough for a geology beginner who reads carefully to understand.
April 28, 2016
“He said, “Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource. It’s not, if you’re mining it. Arizona is mining groundwater.”
― John McPhee, Assembling California
This year I've been reading the separate segments of McPhee's Pulitzer Prize winning 1998 opus Annals of the Former World, but skipped (for now) Rising from the Plains because I was going to be driving with my brother from San Francisco to Mesa, AZ. We were going to hang in Berkeley and hit Yosemite, Sequoia, etc., on our trip South and East and I figured it was a perfect time to read 'Assembling California'.
Like all McPhee writing, 'Assembling California 'is an amazing conglomeration of good writing, great characters, and interesting technical facts. However, unlike the earlier books in this series ( Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain) it just doesn't set up as nicely. I'm not sure if it had more to do with the messiness of California's geology, the limits of Eldridge Moores as an engaging character, or if McPhee had just grown a bit tired of his own Great I-80 Geology Project. He is engaging, but there just wasn't as much sparkle or heat as with Karen Kleinspehn, Kenneth Deffeyes, or Anita Harris. A solid McPhee and a good addition to the series, just not the strongest piece. I hope that 'Rising from the Plains' works out a bit better.
― John McPhee, Assembling California
This year I've been reading the separate segments of McPhee's Pulitzer Prize winning 1998 opus Annals of the Former World, but skipped (for now) Rising from the Plains because I was going to be driving with my brother from San Francisco to Mesa, AZ. We were going to hang in Berkeley and hit Yosemite, Sequoia, etc., on our trip South and East and I figured it was a perfect time to read 'Assembling California'.
Like all McPhee writing, 'Assembling California 'is an amazing conglomeration of good writing, great characters, and interesting technical facts. However, unlike the earlier books in this series ( Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain) it just doesn't set up as nicely. I'm not sure if it had more to do with the messiness of California's geology, the limits of Eldridge Moores as an engaging character, or if McPhee had just grown a bit tired of his own Great I-80 Geology Project. He is engaging, but there just wasn't as much sparkle or heat as with Karen Kleinspehn, Kenneth Deffeyes, or Anita Harris. A solid McPhee and a good addition to the series, just not the strongest piece. I hope that 'Rising from the Plains' works out a bit better.
October 11, 2020
4.9 miles
You take Lake Merced Blvd, a 13 minute drive.
I lived 4.9 miles from Mussel Rock, from the San Andreas Fault, and didn’t even know.
Mussel Rock is where the San Andreas Fault enters the ocean.
I recently scoured the internet for reports of an earthquake in San Francisco sometime in 1999 between March and September. I was alone in a high rise, 8th floor, and my bed was shaking around 2 am, and one thing fell out in the living room, but then it stopped, and it was before the internet, so I went back to sleep, and never had much curiosity about it afterwards. At the time, I groggily knew, earthquake, and knew this was my first, and knew of the San Andreas Fault, and I remember panicking but then it stopped. And I went back to sleep, thinking what would have happened if it was the Big One? I know I mentioned it the next day to coworkers, and they said it was probably an inconsequential 2.4 on the Richter scale. I made that up because I can’t remember. On average, it has to be 2.5 or greater to be felt or do damage, but there was no damage and I will never know for sure. It is lost to time, but another example of time wrapping around in my mind, time travelling, and feeling it as if it was yesterday and how consequential to my mind now, the awe and wonder more alive now. There are 900,000 2.5 or less per year, and only 30,000 2.5 to 5.4 per year. So.
"You go down through the Ocean View district of San Francisco to the first freeway exit after Daly City, where south to Mussel Rock. It was like a three-story building, standing in the Pacific, with brown pelicans on the roof, and on shore, a huge crack split the cliff from top to bottom and ran on out through the ledge and under the waves. After a five-hundred-mile northwesterly drift through southern and central California, this was where the San Andreas Fault intersected the sea.
With regard to the lithosphere, it’s a good place to sit and watch the plates move. It is a moment in geography that does your thinking for you. The San Andreas Fault, of course, is not a single strand. It is something like a wire rope, as much as half a mile wide, each strand the signature of one or many earthquakes.”
“You cannot really say that on one side of the big crack is the North American Plate and on the other side is the Pacific ...you imagine it, though—your right foot, say, riding backward toward Mexico, your left foot in motion toward Alaska. There’s some truth in such a picture, but the actual plate boundary is not so sharply defined. Whether the plate boundary is five miles wide or fifty miles wide or extends all the way to central Utah is a matter that geologists currently debate.”
“People who live in earthquake country will speak of earthquake weather, which they characterize as very balmy, no winds. With prescient animals and fluctuating water wells, the study of earthquake weather is in a category of precursor that has not attracted funds from the National Science Foundation.”
This may be my favorite section since Cali holds a place in my heart, or a piece of my heart, and the book covers an ocean crust expert, so there is a lot of oceanic imagery and terms, and I am missing the ocean right now and always. “From spreading to subduction, from creation to extinction, the ocean crust completely cleans house in fewer than two hundred million years, ” compared to the more than 1000 years for the ocean waters to completely mix, which is enough of a mind bender. If the 200 million years is too much, start with the water cycle to blow your mind. Open. “From the mantle upward, the complete column of ocean-floor rock is collectively known in geology as an ophiolite.” äfēəˌlīt. A beautiful, lyrical word that is like a poem itself.
“Fifty thousand major earthquakes will move something about a hundred miles. After there was nothing, earthquakes brought things from far parts of the world to fashion California. Then, a piece at a time—according to present theory—parts began to assemble. An island arc here, a piece of a continent there—a Japan at a time, a New Zealand, a Madagascar—came crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered.”
“Downtown, we walked by the Transamerica Building, with its wide base, its high sides narrowing to a point, and other buildings immensely tall and straight. Deffeyes said, “There are two earthquake-resistant structures—the pyramids and the redwoods. These guys are working both sides of the street.”
“So radical and contemporary were the regional tectonics that the highest and the lowest points in the contiguous United States were within eighty miles of each other in California.”
I have been to the TransAmerica building but not Mount Whitney at 14, 494 feet above sea level. I also have not been to Death Valley, where the lowest point is. If we are still in the time warp, it is testimony to how I was never too enamored of superlatives and beauty was my goal, but also just not recognizing how this all fits together; my geology gene didn’t kick in quite yet on the journey. I love the quotes above for several reasons: the idea of a Japan, or something like it, a Madagascar, or something like it, creating California brings it to life. If you only need 50,000 earthquakes for 100 miles, major ones, how far did the quake I feel move something, and I was there for it, awe and wonder cascading.
“Why all this Fourth of July geology is because in the Pliocene a triple junction of lithospheric terranes is just off San Francisco, and six million years before the present, in the late Miocene, Moores and his apricot tree would be in or beside a saltwater bay that covers most of the Great Central Valley. It is full of tuna and other large fish, because an upwelling of cold water (like the upwelling in the Humboldt Current off modern Peru) has filled the bay with nutrients. One terrane is moving along the west side of the San Andreas Fault. Carrying with it the sites of San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Big Sur, Monterey, and Salinas, it will someday be known as Salinia.”
“In the Eocene, fifty million years ago, Moores’ backyard in Davis is mud at the bottom of the Farallon Ocean, some thirty miles….In the Cretaceous, some eighty or ninety million years ago, Moores’ address is a precariously inclined deep-sea fan—a spilling of sediment down the continental slope toward the trench where the Farallon Plate is disappearing.”
Many of the other books describes a continental breadth of the different epochs (travelling I80 from New Jersey to San Francisco in the Creataceous, like this), and I really loved using the geologists home in the Central Valley as a fulcrum to expand the same idea; saltwater bay to deep sea mud to continental slope. I linked it elsewhere, but would love for this site to have even more detail someday (am I the only one?) https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-...
“Remember about mountains: what they are made of is not what made them. With the exception of volcanoes, when mountains rise, as a result of some tectonic force, they consist of what happened to be there. In this cross section, the Coast Ranges occupy forty miles, the Central Valley fifty miles, the Sierra Nevada mountains ninety. All of it added together is not a great distance. It is not as much as New York to Boston. It is Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. In breadth and in profile, a comparable country lies between Genoa and Zurich—the Apennines, the Po Plain, the Alps.”
Moores, a geologist talks about the “joy of being with the geology, but also the disconnect . The two time scales—the one human and emotional, the other geologic—are so disparate. But a sense of geologic time is the most important thing to get across to the non-geologist: the slow rate of geologic processes—centimetres per year—with huge effects if continued for enough years. A million years is a small number on the geologic time scale, while human experience is truly fleeting—all human experience, from its beginning, not just one lifetime. Only occasionally do the two time scales coincide.”
This. This juxtaposition of solid, tangible land and distances, and the ethereal sense of time is why I come back to his writing again and again. He says elsewhere that our minds can measure deep time, but may not able to comprehend it; I want to, I want everyone to. As Blake says, “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” And people in Victorian times says Annie Dillard, averted their eyes from the majestic crags of the Alps, perceiving them as against the so called natural manicured order the Bible suggests. I am like a missionary of the wisdom of geology. I aim to illuminate and force wonder into your minds; not to save them in a traditional sense, but in a planetary sense. It is our only hope for a better world. You can’t be racist and know deep time. You can’t be sleepwalking through your life of Thoreau’s quiet desperation after opening your mind to this concept and wisdom. Time is this giant thing, bigger than we can envision, as big as the universe, and it is suffused with mystery and wonder for all to access, and it is a high of galactic proportions.
Other quotes:
"When rocks in their variety arrive in a given place, like furniture going into storage, they hold within themselves their individual histories: their dates of solidification, their environments of deposition, or their metamorphic experience, as the case may be. Their unit-to-unit relationship—their stratigraphy and other juxtapositions—pondered as a whole is structure. Structure on the move is tectonics.”
“The Sierra Nevada range began to rise only a very short geologic time ago—perhaps three million years, or four million years—and it is still rising, still active, continually at play with the Richter scale and occasionally driven by great earthquakes.”
“If you had lived on the moon then, as a full earth came into the sky you would have seen two large continents (Laurasia and Gondwanaland), one above the other, surrounded and divided by ocean. West to east, the dividing seas were the incipient Caribbean (Central America was not there), the incipient Atlantic, and—from Gibraltar through China—the long water known in geology as Tethys.”
“The serpentine has weathered into soil, now planted to vines. These are some of the few grapes in California that are grown in the soil of the state rock. Moores is predisposed toward the wine. To him, its bouquet is ophiolitic, its aftertaste slow to part with serpentine’s lingering mystery. To me, it tastes less of the deep ocean than of low tide. The stuff is fermented peridotite—a Mohorivicic red with the lustre of chromium.”
“As India moved north, its highest rate of speed was a hundred and forty-two miles per million years. The present rate of compression is about a quarter of that, or two inches a year. If this could be recorded in stop-action photography, like the boiling swirls of cumulus clouds or the unfolding of a rose, it could indeed express itself kinetically. But two inches a year is an encounter so slow that a word like “collision” distorts its scale.”
“Japan is coming toward North America one centimetre a year. It may be a part of Alaska in eight hundred million years. “Florida is covered with marine sand on top of limestone on top of Paleozoic rocks. The Paleozoic rocks derive from Africa. That is what you are saying?” “That’s right. Southern Florida is a piece of Africa which was left behind when the Atlantic opened up.” Southeastern Staten Island is a piece of Europe glued to an ophiolite from the northwest Iapetus floor. Nova Scotia is European, and so is southeastern Newfoundland. Boston is African. The north of Ireland is American. The northwest Highlands of Scotland are American. So is much of Norway. Alexander Terrane of southeastern Alaska, which includes Juneau and Sitka, drifted ten thousand miles from eastern Australia to Peru and then north to its present position. Vancouver Island seems to have followed; its paleomagnetism indicates that it came from the latitude of Bolivia and arrived in the Eocene. The sites of Laguna Beach and Pasadena are fourteen miles closer together than they were 2.2 million years ago. This has happened an earthquake at a time. For example, both the Whittier Narrows earthquake of 1987 and the Northridge earthquake of 1994 lessened the breadth of the Santa Monica Mountains and raised the ridgeline. ”
“While India was closing with Tibet, it buckled the intervening shelf, raising from the sea a slab of rock more than a mile thick, a part of which is now the top of Mt. Everest. From the depths of lithification to the rock’s present loft, it has been driven upward at least fifty thousand feet. In the tectonic history of the globe, we have no idea how many times this has happened.”
You take Lake Merced Blvd, a 13 minute drive.
I lived 4.9 miles from Mussel Rock, from the San Andreas Fault, and didn’t even know.
Mussel Rock is where the San Andreas Fault enters the ocean.
I recently scoured the internet for reports of an earthquake in San Francisco sometime in 1999 between March and September. I was alone in a high rise, 8th floor, and my bed was shaking around 2 am, and one thing fell out in the living room, but then it stopped, and it was before the internet, so I went back to sleep, and never had much curiosity about it afterwards. At the time, I groggily knew, earthquake, and knew this was my first, and knew of the San Andreas Fault, and I remember panicking but then it stopped. And I went back to sleep, thinking what would have happened if it was the Big One? I know I mentioned it the next day to coworkers, and they said it was probably an inconsequential 2.4 on the Richter scale. I made that up because I can’t remember. On average, it has to be 2.5 or greater to be felt or do damage, but there was no damage and I will never know for sure. It is lost to time, but another example of time wrapping around in my mind, time travelling, and feeling it as if it was yesterday and how consequential to my mind now, the awe and wonder more alive now. There are 900,000 2.5 or less per year, and only 30,000 2.5 to 5.4 per year. So.
"You go down through the Ocean View district of San Francisco to the first freeway exit after Daly City, where south to Mussel Rock. It was like a three-story building, standing in the Pacific, with brown pelicans on the roof, and on shore, a huge crack split the cliff from top to bottom and ran on out through the ledge and under the waves. After a five-hundred-mile northwesterly drift through southern and central California, this was where the San Andreas Fault intersected the sea.
With regard to the lithosphere, it’s a good place to sit and watch the plates move. It is a moment in geography that does your thinking for you. The San Andreas Fault, of course, is not a single strand. It is something like a wire rope, as much as half a mile wide, each strand the signature of one or many earthquakes.”
“You cannot really say that on one side of the big crack is the North American Plate and on the other side is the Pacific ...you imagine it, though—your right foot, say, riding backward toward Mexico, your left foot in motion toward Alaska. There’s some truth in such a picture, but the actual plate boundary is not so sharply defined. Whether the plate boundary is five miles wide or fifty miles wide or extends all the way to central Utah is a matter that geologists currently debate.”
“People who live in earthquake country will speak of earthquake weather, which they characterize as very balmy, no winds. With prescient animals and fluctuating water wells, the study of earthquake weather is in a category of precursor that has not attracted funds from the National Science Foundation.”
This may be my favorite section since Cali holds a place in my heart, or a piece of my heart, and the book covers an ocean crust expert, so there is a lot of oceanic imagery and terms, and I am missing the ocean right now and always. “From spreading to subduction, from creation to extinction, the ocean crust completely cleans house in fewer than two hundred million years, ” compared to the more than 1000 years for the ocean waters to completely mix, which is enough of a mind bender. If the 200 million years is too much, start with the water cycle to blow your mind. Open. “From the mantle upward, the complete column of ocean-floor rock is collectively known in geology as an ophiolite.” äfēəˌlīt. A beautiful, lyrical word that is like a poem itself.
“Fifty thousand major earthquakes will move something about a hundred miles. After there was nothing, earthquakes brought things from far parts of the world to fashion California. Then, a piece at a time—according to present theory—parts began to assemble. An island arc here, a piece of a continent there—a Japan at a time, a New Zealand, a Madagascar—came crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered.”
“Downtown, we walked by the Transamerica Building, with its wide base, its high sides narrowing to a point, and other buildings immensely tall and straight. Deffeyes said, “There are two earthquake-resistant structures—the pyramids and the redwoods. These guys are working both sides of the street.”
“So radical and contemporary were the regional tectonics that the highest and the lowest points in the contiguous United States were within eighty miles of each other in California.”
I have been to the TransAmerica building but not Mount Whitney at 14, 494 feet above sea level. I also have not been to Death Valley, where the lowest point is. If we are still in the time warp, it is testimony to how I was never too enamored of superlatives and beauty was my goal, but also just not recognizing how this all fits together; my geology gene didn’t kick in quite yet on the journey. I love the quotes above for several reasons: the idea of a Japan, or something like it, a Madagascar, or something like it, creating California brings it to life. If you only need 50,000 earthquakes for 100 miles, major ones, how far did the quake I feel move something, and I was there for it, awe and wonder cascading.
“Why all this Fourth of July geology is because in the Pliocene a triple junction of lithospheric terranes is just off San Francisco, and six million years before the present, in the late Miocene, Moores and his apricot tree would be in or beside a saltwater bay that covers most of the Great Central Valley. It is full of tuna and other large fish, because an upwelling of cold water (like the upwelling in the Humboldt Current off modern Peru) has filled the bay with nutrients. One terrane is moving along the west side of the San Andreas Fault. Carrying with it the sites of San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Big Sur, Monterey, and Salinas, it will someday be known as Salinia.”
“In the Eocene, fifty million years ago, Moores’ backyard in Davis is mud at the bottom of the Farallon Ocean, some thirty miles….In the Cretaceous, some eighty or ninety million years ago, Moores’ address is a precariously inclined deep-sea fan—a spilling of sediment down the continental slope toward the trench where the Farallon Plate is disappearing.”
Many of the other books describes a continental breadth of the different epochs (travelling I80 from New Jersey to San Francisco in the Creataceous, like this), and I really loved using the geologists home in the Central Valley as a fulcrum to expand the same idea; saltwater bay to deep sea mud to continental slope. I linked it elsewhere, but would love for this site to have even more detail someday (am I the only one?) https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-...
“Remember about mountains: what they are made of is not what made them. With the exception of volcanoes, when mountains rise, as a result of some tectonic force, they consist of what happened to be there. In this cross section, the Coast Ranges occupy forty miles, the Central Valley fifty miles, the Sierra Nevada mountains ninety. All of it added together is not a great distance. It is not as much as New York to Boston. It is Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. In breadth and in profile, a comparable country lies between Genoa and Zurich—the Apennines, the Po Plain, the Alps.”
Moores, a geologist talks about the “joy of being with the geology, but also the disconnect . The two time scales—the one human and emotional, the other geologic—are so disparate. But a sense of geologic time is the most important thing to get across to the non-geologist: the slow rate of geologic processes—centimetres per year—with huge effects if continued for enough years. A million years is a small number on the geologic time scale, while human experience is truly fleeting—all human experience, from its beginning, not just one lifetime. Only occasionally do the two time scales coincide.”
This. This juxtaposition of solid, tangible land and distances, and the ethereal sense of time is why I come back to his writing again and again. He says elsewhere that our minds can measure deep time, but may not able to comprehend it; I want to, I want everyone to. As Blake says, “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.” And people in Victorian times says Annie Dillard, averted their eyes from the majestic crags of the Alps, perceiving them as against the so called natural manicured order the Bible suggests. I am like a missionary of the wisdom of geology. I aim to illuminate and force wonder into your minds; not to save them in a traditional sense, but in a planetary sense. It is our only hope for a better world. You can’t be racist and know deep time. You can’t be sleepwalking through your life of Thoreau’s quiet desperation after opening your mind to this concept and wisdom. Time is this giant thing, bigger than we can envision, as big as the universe, and it is suffused with mystery and wonder for all to access, and it is a high of galactic proportions.
Other quotes:
"When rocks in their variety arrive in a given place, like furniture going into storage, they hold within themselves their individual histories: their dates of solidification, their environments of deposition, or their metamorphic experience, as the case may be. Their unit-to-unit relationship—their stratigraphy and other juxtapositions—pondered as a whole is structure. Structure on the move is tectonics.”
“The Sierra Nevada range began to rise only a very short geologic time ago—perhaps three million years, or four million years—and it is still rising, still active, continually at play with the Richter scale and occasionally driven by great earthquakes.”
“If you had lived on the moon then, as a full earth came into the sky you would have seen two large continents (Laurasia and Gondwanaland), one above the other, surrounded and divided by ocean. West to east, the dividing seas were the incipient Caribbean (Central America was not there), the incipient Atlantic, and—from Gibraltar through China—the long water known in geology as Tethys.”
“The serpentine has weathered into soil, now planted to vines. These are some of the few grapes in California that are grown in the soil of the state rock. Moores is predisposed toward the wine. To him, its bouquet is ophiolitic, its aftertaste slow to part with serpentine’s lingering mystery. To me, it tastes less of the deep ocean than of low tide. The stuff is fermented peridotite—a Mohorivicic red with the lustre of chromium.”
“As India moved north, its highest rate of speed was a hundred and forty-two miles per million years. The present rate of compression is about a quarter of that, or two inches a year. If this could be recorded in stop-action photography, like the boiling swirls of cumulus clouds or the unfolding of a rose, it could indeed express itself kinetically. But two inches a year is an encounter so slow that a word like “collision” distorts its scale.”
“Japan is coming toward North America one centimetre a year. It may be a part of Alaska in eight hundred million years. “Florida is covered with marine sand on top of limestone on top of Paleozoic rocks. The Paleozoic rocks derive from Africa. That is what you are saying?” “That’s right. Southern Florida is a piece of Africa which was left behind when the Atlantic opened up.” Southeastern Staten Island is a piece of Europe glued to an ophiolite from the northwest Iapetus floor. Nova Scotia is European, and so is southeastern Newfoundland. Boston is African. The north of Ireland is American. The northwest Highlands of Scotland are American. So is much of Norway. Alexander Terrane of southeastern Alaska, which includes Juneau and Sitka, drifted ten thousand miles from eastern Australia to Peru and then north to its present position. Vancouver Island seems to have followed; its paleomagnetism indicates that it came from the latitude of Bolivia and arrived in the Eocene. The sites of Laguna Beach and Pasadena are fourteen miles closer together than they were 2.2 million years ago. This has happened an earthquake at a time. For example, both the Whittier Narrows earthquake of 1987 and the Northridge earthquake of 1994 lessened the breadth of the Santa Monica Mountains and raised the ridgeline. ”
“While India was closing with Tibet, it buckled the intervening shelf, raising from the sea a slab of rock more than a mile thick, a part of which is now the top of Mt. Everest. From the depths of lithification to the rock’s present loft, it has been driven upward at least fifty thousand feet. In the tectonic history of the globe, we have no idea how many times this has happened.”
March 25, 2025
A few years ago I read The Control of Nature and was impressed by John McPhee's writing. And I enjoy reading about geology, especially when it's relevant to me (I live in California). But this just didn't impress me much. McPhee explains the hodge-podge geology of California through his travels with geologists... and it feels very memoir-ish or travelogue-ish, but not as interesting. I was going to just give it 2 stars (okay) but his account of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was so compelling I decided on 3 (good). I wish he'd have written it a year later and included the Northridge quake as well.
November 24, 2021
“The ebullient Deffeyes said, “Come into the Sierra and commune with the granite.”
Notes: Listened to the audiobook while driving from Reno south to Lake Tahoe and then west to Stinson Beach—from the basin and range to eclectic Franciscan slop.
Notes: Listened to the audiobook while driving from Reno south to Lake Tahoe and then west to Stinson Beach—from the basin and range to eclectic Franciscan slop.
April 1, 2020
This book backs up all I was taught as a child about California geology — it’s neat, but incredibly frightening. John McPhee breaks down California geology and plate tectonics so well you’d think he was a geologist. I was especially taken with his chapters about the Sierras/foothills and the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Read
August 22, 2010Californians all think we understand plate tectonics as it affects our lives -- the Pacific Plate sliding northwest against the North American Plate along the San Andreas fault, resulting in earthquakes -- but HOW do we know that which now seems so obvious? Well it turns out that in the 1960s a few hardy geologists went out into the field and devoted their professional lives to staring at and interpreting roadside "glop" that daunted geologists from other areas. And it also turns out that the geology of California is far more complex and peculiar than you'd ever know from the basic "two plates, transform fault, earthquakes" story.
This book, the logical conclusion of McPhee's geology tetralogy (later collected and Pulitzered as _Annals of the Former World_), came out in 1993 -- right before the Web era. Personally I can't imagine reading it without being able to refer to Google every few paragraphs. I had the Wikipedia page on "ophiolites" up almost every day for weeks. In the end tho, I decided that McPhee's explanation is far more likely to stick in the memory if you can wrap your head around it at all. There are no visual cues, but his descriptions are almost better than photos of rocks. For instance, anyone who loves Yosemite will immediately understand what he means by describing the Sierra Nevada batholith as a giant zeppelin made up of large discrete granite airbags.
The main human subject of McPhee's interest is tectonicist Eldridge Moores of the University of California at Davis, who made a massive contribution to geology by being the first to propose that California had been assembled by successive island arcs -- the equivalent of a few Japans or Philippines -- slamming into it over time. Even in comparison to other eminent geologists, Moores evinces an almost freakish ability to identify rocks in the field, build up a four-dimensional picture of them in his mind, and then write up an explanation. McPhee makes it amply clear how jumbled and singular the rock story in California can be, simply by describing the piles of miscellaneous rock they see on their rambles around the state -- and then Moores's explanation of them, which often sounds like this: "It is mostly andesite mudflow breccia with reworked stream gravel in it and glacial till on top, which appears to be moraine but is not."
Through Moores, who in his own words "hit the beach in the second wave" of the theory being worked out, McPhee is also able to point up how recent our understanding of plate tectonics is. In the professional lifetime of this one geologist, a revolution in the science seems to have played out. California was far more central to that work than I had previously understood. And by the way, after finishing this book I am solidly on Team "serpentine should remain our state rock".
After 200 pages of ophiolites, McPhee finally turns to the one thing everyone thinks they know about California geology: earthquakes along the San Andreas. For me, the last couple of chapters -- which attempt to bring geologic time into human scale -- seemed a bit tacked on because the author is rather abruptly pivoting from a long, carefully told story about how California was assembled, to a much shorter bit about disassembly. I can't particularly say I understand yet how the same basic forces that glued the Sierra Nevada onto North America are now responsible for moving everything west of my house in the direction of Alaska.
However, a few more trips through this book and I might start to figure it out. I've already read it three times in rapid succession -- almost unheard of for me -- and expect I'll refer to it often in the future. I actually found it rather difficult to grasp, which goes to prove that the "Rocks for Jocks" idea of geology as the easiest of the sciences is only true if by science you mean a collection of received facts without hard work, deep understanding, or struggle. I'm still struggling to understand plate tectonics as it applies to my daily life, but now at least I feel like I'm struggling with more specific questions... some of which may not have good answers yet.
This book, the logical conclusion of McPhee's geology tetralogy (later collected and Pulitzered as _Annals of the Former World_), came out in 1993 -- right before the Web era. Personally I can't imagine reading it without being able to refer to Google every few paragraphs. I had the Wikipedia page on "ophiolites" up almost every day for weeks. In the end tho, I decided that McPhee's explanation is far more likely to stick in the memory if you can wrap your head around it at all. There are no visual cues, but his descriptions are almost better than photos of rocks. For instance, anyone who loves Yosemite will immediately understand what he means by describing the Sierra Nevada batholith as a giant zeppelin made up of large discrete granite airbags.
The main human subject of McPhee's interest is tectonicist Eldridge Moores of the University of California at Davis, who made a massive contribution to geology by being the first to propose that California had been assembled by successive island arcs -- the equivalent of a few Japans or Philippines -- slamming into it over time. Even in comparison to other eminent geologists, Moores evinces an almost freakish ability to identify rocks in the field, build up a four-dimensional picture of them in his mind, and then write up an explanation. McPhee makes it amply clear how jumbled and singular the rock story in California can be, simply by describing the piles of miscellaneous rock they see on their rambles around the state -- and then Moores's explanation of them, which often sounds like this: "It is mostly andesite mudflow breccia with reworked stream gravel in it and glacial till on top, which appears to be moraine but is not."
Through Moores, who in his own words "hit the beach in the second wave" of the theory being worked out, McPhee is also able to point up how recent our understanding of plate tectonics is. In the professional lifetime of this one geologist, a revolution in the science seems to have played out. California was far more central to that work than I had previously understood. And by the way, after finishing this book I am solidly on Team "serpentine should remain our state rock".
After 200 pages of ophiolites, McPhee finally turns to the one thing everyone thinks they know about California geology: earthquakes along the San Andreas. For me, the last couple of chapters -- which attempt to bring geologic time into human scale -- seemed a bit tacked on because the author is rather abruptly pivoting from a long, carefully told story about how California was assembled, to a much shorter bit about disassembly. I can't particularly say I understand yet how the same basic forces that glued the Sierra Nevada onto North America are now responsible for moving everything west of my house in the direction of Alaska.
However, a few more trips through this book and I might start to figure it out. I've already read it three times in rapid succession -- almost unheard of for me -- and expect I'll refer to it often in the future. I actually found it rather difficult to grasp, which goes to prove that the "Rocks for Jocks" idea of geology as the easiest of the sciences is only true if by science you mean a collection of received facts without hard work, deep understanding, or struggle. I'm still struggling to understand plate tectonics as it applies to my daily life, but now at least I feel like I'm struggling with more specific questions... some of which may not have good answers yet.
February 5, 2013
I'm going to repost here my review of Basin and Range because it's pretty much exactly the same for this book. I liked this one a bit more because so much of was about the Bay Area, but I'm guessing it would be somewhat incomprehensible to people outside of the Bay Area.
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 audience - a well-suited reader.
Yet I found much of it incomprehensible. Poetic and interesting, but not understandable. It's too technical to be fully engaging for non-scientists, but doesn't include enough maps or diagrams to be illustrative/educational. And it's probably too travelogue-ish or narrative to be of interest to scientists.
I'm glad I read it. Overall, though, I'm disappointed.
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 audience - a well-suited reader.
Yet I found much of it incomprehensible. Poetic and interesting, but not understandable. It's too technical to be fully engaging for non-scientists, but doesn't include enough maps or diagrams to be illustrative/educational. And it's probably too travelogue-ish or narrative to be of interest to scientists.
I'm glad I read it. Overall, though, I'm disappointed.
July 2, 2012
This is the penultimate volume of McPhee’s five-part odyssey of American geology, Annals of the Former World, though it’s just as well read alone. Less excellent, I think, than Basin and Range, it’s still a well crafted piece of non-fiction. The book is worth its dry spots in order to reach the chapters on the 1849 Gold Rush and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The latter I personally found compelling not just for its geology but – as someone who experienced the quake and its long aftermath - for the human toll McPhee chronicles so effectively.
September 5, 2018
Unlike the middle two books of the Annals of the Former World series, this book did not really seem to be a biography of a geologist; Eldridge Moores plays a large role, but the book is really more focused on the way plate tectonics is rearranging the Earth than about the geologist himself.
The book was nice in a sort of soothing way, but I don't think I got much more out of it than a few anecdotes. That may be more down to me having trouble keeping track of all the geology jargon than anything else, though.
The book was nice in a sort of soothing way, but I don't think I got much more out of it than a few anecdotes. That may be more down to me having trouble keeping track of all the geology jargon than anything else, though.
July 16, 2008
More than a book about California geology. Includes history of California Gold Rush and discovery of plate tectonics in the 1960s. I am listening to the book so trying to visualize the formations the author talks about is challenging but there are hardly any illustrations in the hard copy anyway.
April 8, 2017
This is the fourth volume of John McPhee's geology tetralogy, the other volumes of which are Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, and Rising from the Plains. I delayed finishing the quartet because, as a California resident, I relished the enjoyment I would get from reading Assembling California. My only disappointment is that, being an Easterner, McPhee was mostly enthralled by Northern California, especially the area around I-80. Oh, well, it happens.
Assembling California is all about a fact that, in its own way, replicates how the people of California came together from everywhere. So, too, did the pieces of rock that form the state migrate from all over the world and stick together—a process which will continue over millions of years to take the start apart just as it put it all together. Geologist Eldridge Moores writes:
There are times when I stop and listen, waiting for the earth to rise up again and send me into paroxysms of terror. Whether I live or die will depend if “I am in the right place at the right time.” I can pretend that I will never experience another earthquake, but the chances are good that I will.
Assembling California is all about a fact that, in its own way, replicates how the people of California came together from everywhere. So, too, did the pieces of rock that form the state migrate from all over the world and stick together—a process which will continue over millions of years to take the start apart just as it put it all together. Geologist Eldridge Moores writes:
People look upon the natural world as if all motions of the past had set the stage for us and were now frozen. They look out at a scene like this and think, It was all made for us—even if the San Andreas Fault is at their feet. To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need. Leonardo Seebler, of Lamont-Doherty, referred to it as the principle of least astonishment. As we have seen this fall, the time we’re in is just as active as the past. The time between events is long only with respect to a human lifetime.I, for one, have been through two major quakes—the Sylmar Quake of 1971 and the North Hills Quake of 1994.
There are times when I stop and listen, waiting for the earth to rise up again and send me into paroxysms of terror. Whether I live or die will depend if “I am in the right place at the right time.” I can pretend that I will never experience another earthquake, but the chances are good that I will.
October 8, 2025
With the exception of the essay-length "Crossing the Craton", this is the final book in the phenomenal Annals of the Former World by John McPhee. In Assembling California, the author once again joins up with a local geologist and discovers various intersections between near-incomprehensible swaths of geologic time, and the mere blip that is human history. Though it may be returning slowly to the sea, most of California west of the Sierra Nevadas apparently came from the sea also, as various islands/land masses smacked into the coast of the continent over millennia. The various faults and sutures precipitated (literally) the Gold Rush as well as earthquakes. After spending so much time trying to wrap my head around the movement of plate tectonics over millions of years, the final section serves up a massive contrast, detailing seconds in time during the big 1989 earthquake. Geologic change takes eons...except when it only takes a second.
November 30, 2023
This is a well-written pop science geology book, but still had a little too much science for me to truly enjoy it. Let me be clear; I don’t think it would be possible to do a better job of writing this particular book; it’s just… science… ugh. But there were two fantastic chapters in this book good enough for me to jack the whole rating up to four stars instead of three: the Gold Rush chapter, and the final chapter about the Loma Prieta earthquake. Nothing but living through it would have been more realistic than reading that chapter on dozens of people who did live through it (or did not, in a few cases). California was formed through violent geology and is still a crazy place with regard to plate tectonics. And after reading this book, I wish even more that I could be there for The Big One that we all know is coming some day.
February 1, 2020
Sprawling meditation on some deep geological theories about how tectonic plates have scooted around the globe and crashed into each other in various ways to achieve lots of things, including California. He talks about the Great Central Valley and what a weird phenomenon it is, history of gold mining, theories of ophilitic ocean rock formations winding up in all kinds of unexpected places, how pieces of various plates break off and remain where you wouldn’t expect — African plate on the US east coast, pieces of east coast in Northern Europe, etc. Also a long section exploring the San Andreas fault, surrounding faults, the science and wackiness of earthquake detection, and what Northern California can expect as far as earthquakes, forever.
May 22, 2024
McPhee's geological writing is by definition middlebrow: more technical than gee-whiz popsci stuff, but still very much for the layman (not, to be clear, a criticism). He is astonished at the way landscapes are revealed to be narratives, and conveys it with real drama--probably the main draw of these books. Of secondary interest but also very good is the way he demonstrates how a geologist sees and thinks, or at least a convincing simplification (no idea how accurate he is about that, or for that matter any of the science, in 1993 or today). Because he is dedicated to not dumbing it down (too much), sections can blend together in a haze of terminology. The big "set pieces" on the gold rush of 1849 and the earthquakes of 1906 and 1989, though, are some of the best magazine writing out there. Still, nothing quite packs the book-length suspense around the creation of the Rockies in Rising From the Plains.
April 1, 2021
A solid closer to the Annals of the Former World magnum opus. All about lovable and crazy California. Amazing that the "gold in them hills" is a result of an oceanic crash of ancient continents, and that there were continental formations eons before Pangaea. But I must repeat the plea of many readers -- why oh why is there no index?
June 23, 2024
This was a lot of fun, as someone who loves Northern California. I will definitely return to parts of this before trips up 80. I was a little confused about the forays into Greece and Macedonia, but I chalk that up to not fully grasping the geology and seeing the deeper connection beyond the geologist. Or maybe that was the point?
December 31, 2021
“Come into the Sierras and commune with granite” is the best way to drive into the Golden State.
August 29, 2025
in all honesty I skimmed through this. I couldn't grasp enough to anchor my interest - it was a bombardment of geologic facts that my layperson brain had trouble contextualizing.
the final chapter, though, about the Loma Prieta earthquake in '89 - told in vivid, fast-paced snippets - had me spellbound. my mom was pregnant with me in SF for that one! so technically I was there ;)
the final chapter, though, about the Loma Prieta earthquake in '89 - told in vivid, fast-paced snippets - had me spellbound. my mom was pregnant with me in SF for that one! so technically I was there ;)
January 7, 2025
loved to see the franciscan complex mentioned <3 also some absolutely insane firsthand experiences from the 1989 earthquake in san francisco
September 17, 2019
John McPhee is an excellent writer; however, this book was too geologically technical for me. While I was able to understand the general concepts, I didn't know many of the terms used. In the end, it was interesting, but not easy reading.
September 14, 2021
I know little geology, but I love John McPhee and I love California. this book was just an absolute treasure, enough of a pleasure to read that I had a smile on my face at least half the time, even if some of the technical terminology of batholiths and grabens and such kind of washed over me. It certainly did its job, because I’m now on the lookout for books on plate tectonics and am super eager to learn more about rocks!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 214 reviews