Annals of the Former World (Paperback)

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.