Annals of the Former World

I read my first book by John McPhee earlier this year, "Oranges", after it was included in a short list of Books you can read in a day by the Economist Magazine.It was a fun read. I was very impressed by his highly readable and amusing style, rather unique for non fiction subjects. So I decided to try his "Annals of the Former World" as the geological history of North America interests me. ( I'm a mechanical engineer and enjoyed my one course in Geology at University) Also, I knew McPhee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this book. I had quite high expectations for it and I was not disappointed. It's a big thick paperback that will take a long time to read in its entirety, but based on the first few chapters, I highly recommend this book.

For me, five stars is a very rare accolade, as in good film reviewing. This is a 'book of my lifetime' in the field of public science writing. I am amateur-passionate about geoscience but have no interest in America or even its geology. This author and monumental volume were unknown to me until recommended by Prof Iain Stewart in a late-night Inverness bar. McPhee was a New Yorker writer of catholic interests, but must have devoted years not just to writing this tome, but to following Interstate 80 coast to coast, always in the company of a leading geologist in each domain it traverses. Their personal histories are integral, and emblematic of pioneer and immigrant America. His style is pure New Yorker, ramming home his key points by endless repetition and variation, verging on the turgid, but we end up knowing our stuff and all concerned. I don't need to go there now. A Pulitzer Prize is one thing, my award is for seeing me through a year of insomnia nights.

John McPhee takes the reader on an epic voyage across and into North America, as well as the field of geology, the lives and ideas of some of its practitioners, and into deep time. This book is a multi-layered, multi-textured reading experience featuring McPhee's enthusiasm for geology, human history, and the precise and illuminating use of language. A slow but rewarding read.

I most enjoyed "Basin and Range" in this tetralogy of geological nonfiction, as that is also the physiography of the land where I live. John McPhee is your best guide and storyteller of our immense, vast, and deep continental history. I cannot properly review the work in a short space, but let me disclose a rather astounding little surprise of the book: While traveling through the Nevada desert at night, McPhee and his companion (a geological expert) witness a large hovering vessel--a vehicle looking very alien and extraterrestrial--fly and propel itself in the most unusual and technologically unique way (but too advanced and luminescent to be military, especially 35 years ago). The next morning the local paper had comments from a number of locals who also reported seeing it. The incident is described in less than a page, only a short aside in the progressive, westward description of the continent, numbering hundreds of pages on an otherwise unrelated subject (or is it?). But by this point, McPhee has already established his credibility with conscientious articulations about his subjects, as well as restrained and informed expressions of the Earth, so that this aside cannot be dismissed so easily. For me, it caused a tumbler to fall in my brain, which seems to have had cascading effects, to the point that I have re-assessed possibilities for such phenomena on Earth. Which ironically brings me full circle to McPhee's subject. If I accept McPhee's account (and I think I just might) it is impossible to not think of the time it must take to travel to Earth from distant origins. Even with incomprehensible technology, the time in travelling must have been immense. And the conclusion emerging from both McPhee's written descriptions, and the cracks in the rocks themselves, is the breath-taking sense of deep time. (Could it be that if visits have occurred, they were only by artificial life forms that can physically endure thousands or even millions of years? Would they have been created by organic life forms? Did they rule over them? But I digress.) The point is that reading McPhee's book and the study of geology give me the sense of how recently we have come along. How even the oldest of the rocks we see, the Precambrian gneiss or schist, could well have come a billion years after other rock planets had been left by those who sought to gather and collect rocks on other planets. If you visit the Grand Canyon you get to see rocks that go back almost half of the 4.5 billion years that span the age of our world. These are the real documents of our Earth's history. And maybe even reflections of eras that coincide with glorious ages of exploration by others in our universe. Maybe that brief blip about a possible alien encounter, in the middle of a lengthy and conscientiously-described account of the geological history of our land, is not so out of place.

Very thorough overview of the geology of the United States of America. East to understand for non geologists as it is written by a writer with an interest in geology. It focusses on the geology found along interstate route I 80, crossing the United States from New York to California, covering the Appalachians, the great plains, the Laramie mountains and the Rockies, each with a different geologist who accompanies the author on his travels.