16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb naturalist, August 10, 2000
This review is from: In Suspect Terrain (Paperback)
McPhee writes elegantly plain English. He finds awesome beauty under foot, in vistas, and in words. His fine and pleasing writing deftly evokes the prodigious forces that shaped the landscape along Interstate 80 from Brooklyn to Chicago. McPhee is a magician: he makes deep geological time come so alive you can almost feel the earth move under your feet as it responds to the titanic forces of shifting continents, water, and ice.
McPhee writes epitomes of geological processes: here glacial forms (and diamonds!) in Indiana, there the Delaware Water Gap, or fossil thermometry by his "tour guide" Anita Harris, frank embarrassments to plate tectonics, Appalachian mountain making, petroleum cooking, or again the Ice Ages. This paean to nature, without mysticism, is printed in an old fashioned typeface on quality paper. It has no maps, sections, or illustrations. If you indexed the somewhat non-linear text yourself, this would be an instructive companion to take along on your next trip on eastern Route 80 (or an entire traverse of America if you add the other three books in McPhee's impressive "cross-section" of North America: Rising from the Plain, Basin & Range, Assembling California).
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All in one ZIP code . . . ?, March 31, 2002
This review is from: In Suspect Terrain (Paperback)
Whatever drove John McPhee to writing of geology should be found and packaged. It would find a ready market in university science departments. This finest of American essayists produced a series of exemplary books on how North America came to be. His journeys gleaning the information he provides us, traversed the continent, chiefly along an Interstate highway, examining roadcuts, adjacent outcrops and surrounding mountains. His guides were America's foremost geologists, their work often hiding them from the public gaze. McPhee brings them into view, relating their work, their personalities, their accomplishment through unmatched descriptive prose.
In this book, McPhee teams up with geologist Anita Harris in touring the eastern mountains of North America from the coast to the southern shores of the Great Lakes. The journey is far more than the examination and cataloging of rocks. McPhee has elsewhere expressed his sense of history with peerless ability. Here, he extends history to deep time as he and Harris examine the formation of the Appalachian Mountain chains. The lithic record, as might be imagined, is hardly clear-cut. Rock formations are jumbled, twisted, folded over in a confusing testimony to the Earth's action in forming continents. McPhee, in the beginning, is as confused as the rocks - and the reader. Harris, with admirable patience, explains the rocks and what they express, helping McPhee, and us, to see their history. "I haven't worked at this level since I don't know when," she says of his novice status. Her knowledge and his prose skills manage to advance our knowledge painlessly. The rocks, however, daunt their efforts to paint a uncomplicated picture.
When the idea of plate tectonics emerged in the 1960s, McPhee explains, it was a revolutionary view of our planet. Replacing the older "drying, wrinkling apple" scenario, plate tectonics provided an elegant, sweeping picture of continental forming. Within a decade, the North American Plate, the Pacific Plate, the Eurasian Plate took places in the niches of our memories. Schools quickly adopted the new science, supported by expressively illustrated textbooks. "Continental drift" became a "buzzword" in jokes, advertising, and other memetic devices. To Anita Harris, this ready acceptance blinded even geologists to the truly complex record of the area she dubs "suspect terrain." Through McPhee she shows us that "a given place will have been at one time below fresh water, at another under brine, will have been mountainous country, a quiet plain, an equatorial desert, an arctic coast, a coal swamp, and a river delta - all in one ZIP Code." All this activity, no matter how anciently derived, requires explanation. Harris reminds him that "geology" is derived from Gaea, the daughter of Chaos. Recounting the source of Appalachian land forms remains an unfulfilled task.
Along with continental movement are the vagaries of weather. Mountain building is always associated with erosion, McPhee reminds us. He goes on to describe the effects of the greatest eroder of them all, the three kilometre thick ice sheets that pushed Canadian diamonds into Indiana. Along with gemstones, the glaciers bore a cargo of rocks and soil acquired in their journey southward. The "suspect terrain" this bears marks of ice, volcanic activity, unexplained mountain building and oceanic advances and retreats. It may not be a pretty picture, but in McPhee's descriptive hand, its fascination is endless. For learning geology or simply to bask in superior writing skills, this book is outdone by only one means - more John McPhee.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
McPhee can even make Anita Harris interesting, September 24, 2005
This review is from: In Suspect Terrain (Paperback)
McPhee can do it all: explain a complex scientific concept in clean, clear prose; perfectly divine and express the poetic nature underlying seemingly mundane geologic features; conjure up vivid panoramas of worlds lost deep in geologic time; and, no less amazingly, make us actually believe that we even personally like the brilliant, but crass, Doctor Anita Harris! Like Basin and Range, and La Place de la Concorde Suisse, very well written and wonderfully told.
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