Annals of the Former World [Hardcover]

John McPhee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 1998

The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years

Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World.

Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction.

 

Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 1978 New Yorker magazine staff writer John McPhee set out making notes for an ambitious project: a geological history of North America, centered, for the sake of convenience, on the 40th parallel, a history that encompasses billions of years. In 1981 he published the first of the four books that would come from his research: Basin and Range, a study of the mountainous lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. Two years later came In Suspect Terrain, a grand overview of the Appalachian mountain system. In 1986 McPhee released Rising from the Plains, a history of the Rocky Mountains set largely in Wyoming. And in 1993 came Assembling California, a survey of the area geologists find to be a laboratory of volcanic and tectonic processes, a place where geology can be watched in the making. Annals of the Former World gathers these four volumes, which McPhee always conceived of as a whole, to make that epic of the Earth's formation; to it he adds a fifth book, Crossing the Craton, which introduces the continent's ancient core, underlying what is now Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.

McPhee's great virtue as a journalist covering the sciences--and any other of the countless subjects he has taken on, for that matter--is his ability to distill and explain complex matters: here, for example, the processes of mineral deposition or of plate tectonics. He does so by allowing geologists to speak for themselves and an entertaining lot they are, those sometimes odd men and women who puzzle out the landscape for clues to its most ancient past. Annals of the Former World is a magisterial work of popular science for which geologists--and devotees of good writing--will be grateful. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

A feast for all John McPhee fans, this major book incorporates some of the author's best work on geology into a comprehensive tour de force. Those familiar with McPhee's writing on the subject of geology will know that his narrative includes not only scientific theory but also portraitures of his geologic guides. While the majority of this material has appeared in the New Yorker and in books such as Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain and Rising from the Plains, the collection, which includes 20,000 new words, is much more than a recycling of past writing. As McPhee says, "The text has been meshed, melded, revised, in some places cut, and everywhere studied for repetition." McPhee's many fans won't be disappointed with the high-quality descriptive portraits of geologists, their work and theories. Since the writing follows McPhee's previous works and not any set geography or geologic logic, the author has provided what he calls a "Narrative Table of Contents," which not only describes each section in turn but the theories discussed in it. In this near flawless compilation of ambitious and expansive scope, McPhee's personalized style remains consistent and triumphant: "Ebbets Field, where they buried the old Brooklyn Dodgers, was also on the terminal moraine. When a long-ball hitter hit a long ball, it would land on Bedford Avenue and bounce down the morainal front to roll toward Coney Island on the outwash plain. No one in Los Angeles would ever hit a homer like that." 25 maps, not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 704 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (June 10, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374105200
• ISBN-13: 978-0374105204
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #188,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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 Pine Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection, 1969), The Crofter and the Laird (1969), Levels of the Game (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid (1972), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame (collection, 1975), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

143 of 149 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary writing on a difficult and complex subject, June 5, 2001

By 

David Kellogg - See all my reviews

This review is from: Annals of the Former World (Paperback)

Although I'm giving this book five stars, I have some reservations.

As is well known, ANNALS collects four earlier books -- Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising From the Plains, and Assembling California -- and adds a fifth section, "Crossing the Craton." All the books show McPhee crossing America along and near Interstate 80 on various trips with geologists. Each book focuses on a different section of I-80 and a different geologist. Together, they are supposed to constitute a more or less complete picture of contemporary geology.

Among current science writers, McPhee has no peer as a stylist. Geology is an incredibly difficult subject to convey in popular terms, and McPhee is often masterful. Numerous passages -- especially in Rising from the Plains and Assembling California --are remarkable. Academic geologists are thankful to him for popularizing their subject, and they should be.

But as a total picture of a science (or of the Earth), I'm not sure ANNALS completely works. Here are my objections.

1. In Suspect Terrain is the weak book of the four. By focusing on a geologist (Anita Harris) whose idiosyncratic views are made overly significant, McPhee confuses the total picture. In the book, Harris questions plate tectonics and repeatedly refers to the "plate-tectonics boys." McPhee subtly allows the fact that Harris is a woman to add legitimacy to her complaint, when that has nothing to do with the objection and in fact some early (and late) plate tectonics contributions were made by women, and not by "boys."

2. The road-trip conceit that shapes the book also limits it. It limits the book to land (generally) and the continental United States (specifically). Occasionally we make detours to Hawai'i, Switzerland, Indonesia, or Greece, but the idea seems to be that North American geology illustrates the whole world, not the other way round.

3. The road-trip conceit also privileges field geology over other kinds of geology (such as geophysical modelling). Even the geophysicists in the book, like Moores in Assembling California, are portrayed with a rugged, outdoorsy pedigree. Like oldsters pissed off about rock and roll, these geologists (Moores excepted) envision modelling as part of the corruption of youth. Obviously the image of the rock-mad field geologist scrambling up a roadcut with a hammer is more attractive, in popular science terms, than the geophysicist at the desk worrying over the parameters of her computer model. But McPhee sometimes allows his romantic presentation of the field geologist to affect his judgement.

4. Because the book was conceived and written over quite a long time, its picture of geology subtly changes without always indicating that it is doing so. Each moment is a snapshot of a discipline, and usually an excellent one -- but the story of how the total discipline came together is sometimes hard to grasp. There are moments when it happens: the story of hot spot theory in Rising from the Plains, for example. But there are two narratives -- one of McPhee's travels at the moment, one of the whole of geology -- that do not completely overlap. (McPhee's new front matter, including his alternate table of contents, make it possible to get such a total picture -- but you would have to do that _very_ deliberately, and probably on a second reading.)

All that said, I must insist that this book is a pleasure to read. I repeatedly got lost, in the good sense, in reading it. Sentence by sentence, it is the best book of popular science in recent memory. While I agree with some other reviewers that more pictures would have been nice, it's one of McPhee's strengths that he is confident that his writing will convey what he wants. That confidence raises the stakes for him as a writer, and he is usually able to meet the challenge he has set.

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Let yourself get buried in the rocks..., February 4, 2000

By 

KarenP (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Annals of the Former World (Hardcover)

Lovers of McPhee will have no trouble burying themselves in this book, for it has as many layers and interests as the folded-and-faulted mountains that are its theme. Anyone new to McPhee should not hesitate to pick it up, as one might, given the size and presumed topic. My only trip to Wyoming was 30 years ago, but now I ache to go back, and see it not as a place that is 80-percent dust and tumbleweed, but as McPhee has uncovered it; his writing is science made literature. I found the other reviews insisting on maps and pictures shallow and disappointing; such visuals would horribly detract from the flow of words, of which McPhee is a virtuoso. McPhee does not set out to write a textbook and teach geology to the novice. He expects you to envision what he is seeing and hearing, whether he is standing inches from a screaming tractor-trailer at a roadcut at Donner Summit, or asea in the names given to the rock we take for granite. Even if you have read the books contained in this quasi-anthology, as I have, it is far more than the sum of its parts, more than simply the books taped cover to cover. Focus on the whole, and come away with new regard for the arrogance of the human race in supposing our effect on this planet, and the wonders of the history of its rock that we may never know.

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best unillustrated work of "popular" geology available, March 6, 2005

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Annals of the Former World (Paperback)

McPhee has collected his four books on American geology in this, his magnum opus. His 650-page essay, much of it originally published in The New Yorker, recounts his travels on Interstate 80, during which he was accompanied by several geologists. As a whole, it is simultaneously an admirable work of awe-inspiring description and astonishing detail and a frustratingly random compilation of theoretical research and overwhelming arcana.

Throughout, McPhee focuses on two geological theories: plate tectonics and continental glaciation, with an emphasis on the former. The four books cover various areas of the United States, out of order: Nevada, New York City, Pennsylvania and the Appalachians, Wyoming and the Rocky Mountains, and California's Central Valley and its flanking mountain ranges. To complete his tour across the continent, he has added a new, relatively short essay, ''Crossing the Craton,'' which encompasses the Great Plains and Great Lakes region.

Along the way, McPhee intersperses what he calls "set pieces" and "time lines," which place geological research in currently held theoretical and chronological contexts: the origins of coal and petroleum, the differences between field geologists and "black box" geologists, a reconstructed view of what Kansas may have looked like during the Middle Proterozoic era. He also interrupts his travels with riveting accounts of notable historical events, from the California Gold Rush to the 1989 earthquake in San Francisco.

Most of the book is endlessly fascinating largely because McPhee is an accomplished prose stylist who can describe just about anything and also because he can be very, very funny. But, every now and then, his powers of description fail him, and he unintentionally confirms that, sometimes, a thousand words isn't worth a single picture. In his section on the development of the world's ophiolites, for example, he dares (and fails) to tackle what no geology textbook would describe without illustrations. During his travels, many of his academic companions remark on the importance of actually "doing" geology--of visiting the field and seeing it for oneself, but McPhee practices his own form of "black box" geology by describing, but never showing (with the exception of a few relief maps), what it is he's talking about. Another, secondary, source of frustration is McPhee's inclination to pose as nonjudgmental recorder, rarely evaluating his material or synthesizing it into a cohesive whole.

Overall, however, "Annals' is probably the best book of "popular" geology one can read--certainly the best without illustrations. Its strengths overpower its faults and the best portions of the book are perceptively witty and unforgettably informative. You'll probably never drive by a roadcut again without pausing to take note of the strata.