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Assembling California
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
As an explainer, John McPhee is a national treasure. The longtime "New Yorker" staff writer has taken us inside the world of art museums, environmental groups, fruit markets, airship factories, basketball courts, and atomic-bomb labs the world over. Here he covers the complex geological history of California, the source of much news today. As Californians daily await the inevitable great earthquake that will send their cities tumbling down like so many matchsticks, McPhee piles fact on luminous fact, wrestling raw data into a beautifully written narrative that gainsays a sedimentologist's warning: "You can't cope with this in an organized way," he told McPhee, "because the rocks aren't organized." As always, McPhee enlarges our understanding of the strange, making it familiar--and endlessly interesting.
From Publishers Weekly
In his usual clean, graceful prose, McPhee takes readers on an intensive geological tour of California, from the Sierra Nevada through wine country to the San Andreas fault system, a 50-mile-wide swath of parallel fault lines. Through talks with his traveling companion, geologist Eldridge Moores, McPhee introduces the reader to current geological controversies, and surveys global plate tectonics--the collision and rearrangement of land masses ever since the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea eons ago. The duo also travel to Arizona, where Moores grew up pushing ore carts in his family's gold mine, and to Cyprus and Greece, where rock from the ocean floor has been tossed up to form continents. McPhee looks at the conjectural science of earthquake prediction and gives an account of a recent San Francisco quake. His leisurely excavation meanders from Mexican explorer Juan Bautista de Anza's settlement of San Francisco in 1776 to 1850s gold-mining camps to the summit of Mount Everest, made of marine limestone lifted from a shelf that once divided India and Tibet. With this volume McPhee concludes his Annals of the Former World series, which he began with Basin and Range (1980). Illustrated.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
As an explainer, John McPhee is a national treasure. The longtime "New Yorker" staff writer has taken us inside the world of art museums, environmental groups, fruit markets, airship factories, basketball courts, and atomic-bomb labs the world over. Here he covers the complex geological history of California, the source of much news today. As Californians daily await the inevitable great earthquake that will send their cities tumbling down like so many matchsticks, McPhee piles fact on luminous fact, wrestling raw data into a beautifully written narrative that gainsays a sedimentologist's warning: "You can't cope with this in an organized way," he told McPhee, "because the rocks aren't organized." As always, McPhee enlarges our understanding of the strange, making it familiar--and endlessly interesting.
From Publishers Weekly
In his usual clean, graceful prose, McPhee takes readers on an intensive geological tour of California, from the Sierra Nevada through wine country to the San Andreas fault system, a 50-mile-wide swath of parallel fault lines. Through talks with his traveling companion, geologist Eldridge Moores, McPhee introduces the reader to current geological controversies, and surveys global plate tectonics--the collision and rearrangement of land masses ever since the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea eons ago. The duo also travel to Arizona, where Moores grew up pushing ore carts in his family's gold mine, and to Cyprus and Greece, where rock from the ocean floor has been tossed up to form continents. McPhee looks at the conjectural science of earthquake prediction and gives an account of a recent San Francisco quake. His leisurely excavation meanders from Mexican explorer Juan Bautista de Anza's settlement of San Francisco in 1776 to 1850s gold-mining camps to the summit of Mount Everest, made of marine limestone lifted from a shelf that once divided India and Tibet. With this volume McPhee concludes his Annals of the Former World series, which he began with Basin and Range (1980). Illustrated.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
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