Annals of the Former World

Take a field trip through North America's Basin and Range province, stretching East to West from Utah to California and South to North from Mexico to Oregon, and you're in a land being pulled apart by Tectonic Forces to someday becoming an arm jutting out from North America into the Pacific Ocean. Baja and California will become first a very long peninsula then later a archipelago west of the continent. Our world is indeed changing all around us. If you really love reading about Geology and Geography then John McPhee's Pulitzer Prize winning 1998 book "Annals of the Former World" may be just what you're looking for. It's actually like reading 5 shorter books on different aspects of geology: regional landscapes, exotic features, exploring the craton and even California*. But no matter what your interest are, if you tackle this monumental work of over 700 pages be prepared for lots of technical terminology in the Earth Sciences and Geography along with some interesting bits of cultural-history, biographies of various geologist and what frontier life was like in the various regions covered. Some readers may not like McPhee's frequent philosophical or biographical passages, that can be quite long and cover a lot of ground, but his inner thoughts just reflect his passion for geology and all the related sciences'. For me this was a long, tough but rewarding read. Some portions of the book flowed along smoothly while others left me feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the author's lengthy and technical writing style, so unless you're up for a very challenging read you might want to look elsewhere. But I, for one, found this to be an enjoyable book that took me to remote location around North America, the Globe, and back into Earth's Deep Time exploring the origins of our landscape, where it came from and where it's going. McPhee's writing is very descriptive, giving you a clear picture of the places he, and his geologist friends, were traveling through. There aren't many illustrations in the Kindle edition; a few photos, some charts and maps, so my iPad got a real workout as I looked up various mountain ranges and other geological regions. But it became clear to me that if I were to take a motor trip through the western United States I would want to have a friendly geologist with me just to help me understand what we were looking at. All features on the Earth have a long history and it helps to have some idea of their origins and the events that led to their present condition. In this book you'll learn about sea mounts and hot-spots, plate tectonics and continental drift, how mountains grow and erode away, how seas come and go and how long all this has been going on. Be sure to read the author’s Afterword: “A Narrative Table of Contents”, it will explain a lot of questions you may have. In my case I read it after but it would also make a good introduction to the author and book. The science in this book was cutting-edge in 1998 but things are always changing and new theories can spring up almost overnight. Over the past decade new observations have lead to new ideas and new ways of looking at the land and its history. But things in geology change at a very slow pace, so whatever “dated” material there may be in the text shouldn’t make any difference to the general reader. If you're interested in learning the history of land formations, diamonds, glacial till or just plain old rocks, than "Annals of the Former World" is a good bet! I had no technical or downloading problems with this Kindle edition. *As far as I can tell the text was also published as 4 or 5 different books, one for each chapter. Last Ranger

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.

Yes it was penned for the layman but make no mistake, Annals of the Former World is a comprehensive treatise on North American geology containing enough hard science to surely please even an academic in the field. Writing in a wonderfully disarming anecdotal style, McPhee primarily covers the geology of several parts of the U.S. but also addresses other parts of the world including Europe, southeast Asia, and South America. Also included are mini-biographies of several prominent geologists and other historical figures wrapped in together with the geology material. Although three of the five volumes of this compilation were originally published in the 1980s, I found in doing a bit of web browsing while reading this book that our understanding of the Earth’s plates and their movements over the last few hundred million years hasn’t fundamentally changed since then. Going back further in geologic time, the vision in Annals becomes considerably murkier with the exception perhaps of the coverage of the ancient core of the North American continent in Book 5 (Crossing the Craton). It’s likely that research and field work over the last twenty years has shed more light on the time period of say 250 to 1000 million years ago (mya). It’s possible that we may never have a clear idea of what the Earth’s land masses really looked like before ~1000 mya, due to the unknowns of what became of land that dove into the mantle at subduction zones at so many plate boundaries and so many times over many hundreds of millions of years. In addition, the lack of skeletal vertebrate life before around 400 mya makes the fossil record much spottier before then and hence, the older layers of rock around the world much more difficult to reliably index to each other in time. Annals is easily one of the best books I’ve read. I’m not surprised at all that it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 in the General Nonfiction category. Over 650 pages but I wish it had been longer!

I discovered "Annals of the Former World" while on a long drive up to Ely Minnesota to canoeing in the Boundary Waters with a couple of friends. It was laying in the back seat of the Suburban and once I picked it up, I could not put it down. I am no literary critic, but as a geologist, I have a special appreciation for this book. I have heard it referred to as "Geo-Poetry". I could not agree more. With out sliding down the slippery slope of fluffy, sentimental goo... McPhee articulates what so many of us feel when we look out over a landscape. Most importantly, he explains what processes created that landscape. This bit of education allows readers to look on the land around them with a deeper appreciation and greater pleasure. As a geologist, I have a blind spot to some of the books short-comings. I see where other readers have pointed out that its very difficult or impossible for most readers to grasp some of the concepts with out any supporting illustrations. I feel this is very true. I found it easy to follow what he was saying because I had a head full of images of fault lines, deposititional l environments and erosional systems in action. I suspect for many readers the lack of illustrations is very difficult - for me it would like be like reading about automobile transmissions with no diagrams. I carry around this volume in paper back and enjoy reading it on nights when I am stuck in a tent alone or some hotel room with nothing but the idiocy on TV for distraction. I passionately recommend McPhee's "Annals of the Former World" but I also passionately recommend that non-geologists also buy a used textbook on basic geology. It will not only help you get past the lack of illustrations - but will give you a nice background in geology..something which I promise will enhance the quality of your life. I give it 4 stars rather than 5 due to the lack of supporting illustrations and maps.

Once again McPhee has enlightened, mesmerized, and enthralled me on this epic journey. This has been an education in geology and the art of writing.

Geology as a page turner! My copy of this book is now so dog eared it looks like a dust brush. I don't know how to praise the writing and this book enough. It will not only make your journeys more enjoyable * By, say, noting how Pt. Reyes is actually a chunk of the Sierra mountains that moved north from the area right about where you go over that huge pass on I5 heading out of the central valley going towards LA. But this book will give you insights into how and where things formed * For example oil is generally former wetlands, often river deltas leading to the ocean that collected all the organics, especially algae and trapped them in the stagnant ponds near the delta outlets over a few million years. Sink them in earth, cook *just right* <else you get coal or worse> and the oil migrates to the sand that once formed the berms at the river ocean outlets. The book will give you a feel for the vast scope of time * For example, "lakes" don't really exist except as fleeting dynamic piffles, like eddies in a river. Lakes fill in fast and so only exist right after glaciers retreat or where earth movements are pulling things apart <sag ponds etc>. Rivers themselves come and go like summer rain showers. But they often act as concentrators of the metals we seek. At the same time you get a view of science in action * It chronicles the slow rise of plate tectonics and shows how science really works as contradiction, new data and ideas slowly topple old paradigms even as the data gathered for those old paradigms becomes fodder for the new ... and are not themselves always wrong, at least locally. I could go on and on. All this and more is written in a book that is more of a page turner than most novels I read. A simply stunning job for a normally glacial subject. It does have some downside. No pictures and almost no maps (look right before the index to see what maps there are and mark them with book tags -- helps a lot). McPhee is a great writer, but not being able to actually see and place some of this stuff is very disappointing and often grating. I recommend reading with Google earth booted up and handy -- I wish someone would put together a photo and/or map and or Google geo-location concordance for this book. Even so -- this is one of those books that becomes a treasured friend over time.

We are offered a glimpse into the unfathomable depth of "history" of the Earth... This is not an easy gift to receive; we miss a lot of information because we'd need to study almost each page with a geography book as well as a detailed map of the Earth, nearby. I read a large part in printed format but I finally started over with the Kindle version where the instant reference of "Pliocene", for example, was very convenient to have at my fingertips. The Bookmark, as well as the Search feature, were also very handy features to have. I would love that John McPhee be able to write an update and tell us what is happening to attempt to reconciliate the numerous inconsistencies in the plate tectonics theory (the Appalachians and the Rockies to name only two) that are described in this book as well as the fascinating "plume" theory (Hawaii and Yellowstone for example). This book would deserve that someone with McPhee's stature takes over the baton and undertake to writes a sequel or simply an revised remake, probably with a more visual slant this time and write an update on the exceptional wealth of information provided by all the extraordinary geologists we meet along that book (The story of the Love family, is probably the one that stood out for me the most but not the only one: they are all fascinating characters in their own right). Just imagine as soon as you step off the pavement on to the rock you are stepping on rocks that are Millions of years old and some of those rocks have traveled thousands of miles at unimaginable depth only to come back out where you see them now. Also remember that oil is a very rare occurrence, the result of amazing and exceptional circumstances produced by the decay of zillions of life forms over eons and kept for at least a million years under a very specific combination of pressure and temperature. Imagine also that water, this ubiquitous element, is present in some form or another in most of the earth crust and is the ultimate lubricant that brought all the rare metals we find close to the surface. The Earth only looks immutable but it actually moves, it twitches, it scratches and scrapes and contorts and twist and dive and warps and folds and of course it also explodes... constantly changing, renewing its surface, as it has for thousands of millions of years and it will still be doing that for thousands of millions more years. We Humans will not be here to see it but other creatures will.

There is something about how John McPhee writes about geology and geologists that calms the soul. I have returned to many sections of this book over and over, and expect to continue to do so, even though, when I first began reading, the language of geology was unfamiliar to me, and is still, to some degree. To me, as a lay enthusiast and reader, geology is not something you master; like any discipline, it is something you do because you become passionate about it. Even though McPhee's writing is sometimes dense, Annals is a good place to start if you want to to undertake the marvelous journey of becoming passionate about the miraculous natural world of rocks and minerals, continental drift, plate tectonics, and geologic times scales, and yes, what is literally beneath our feet and along our interstates and byways. As you read, you start to feel like you're among normal people who are focused upon something much deeper than "short term gains" and the GNP and Facebook; in short, on something besides the complete insanity that is currently the human world. Short of sitting at the edge of Bryce or the Grand Canyons, this book takes you to places of quiet and reflection, of history and geography, and of sheer pleasure in the natural world that are unparalleled. Every time I go back to it, I marvel at how it's put together, and how much information there is in the writing to absorb. McPhee writes in panoramas of geologic time, yet manages to take you on a travelogue "from sea to sea,"across the great expanse that is the land of this country, as well as down into the geological depths of earth processes and how they shift and change. Truly, I have used this book as a form of meditation to cope with the many trials of the current moments, and have not found it wanting.