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| View Larger Image | Assembling California
by John McPhee
| | List Price: | $15.00 | | Price: | $10.20 | | You Save: | $4.80 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 33584 | | Studio: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 224 | | Publication Date: | February 01, 1994 | | Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.
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Amazon.com Review
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. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 21 reviews)
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Setting the Benchmark for Science Writing 
What McPhee teaches us is that most of California, like most Californians, originally came from somewhere else. And he explains, clearly, beautifully and accurately, the complex geological history and consequences of those events.
Yes, this is my favorite in the geology series. Partly it's because I originally come from California, and know some of the areas he writes about. Partly it's because each of the geology books is a snapshot of of the plate tectonics revolution, and this book, the fourth, presents the latest and most developed snapshot. But mostly it is my admiration for McPhee's willingness to take on one of the most complex topics in geology, the ophiolite sequence and its implications, and the sheer elegance of his explanations. If this isn't a coursebook on California geology, it should be. The synthesis of so much geology is a staggering effort; combined with the lucid, even elegant explanations, this has to rank among the most formidable pieces of science writing ever.
Because this is a McPhee book, it involves much more than just geology. The history of Spanish and American exploration, the California gold rush, the technology of hydraulic mining, the mining ghost towns and, of course, a breathtaking narrative of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; even if geology is not fascinating to you, you will enjoy and admire this book.
This is not McPhee's very best book. That's still "Coming into the Country." But it is the best of the geology books and among the two or three best books McPhee has written. And when you are talking of a writer of McPhee's talent, that's saying a lot. My highest recommendation.
July 18, 2006 | |
Explaining the World: A Joy to Read
_Assembling California_, John McPhee
Also recommended as a supplement to McPhee:
_The Behavior of the Earth: Continental and Seafloor Mobility_, Claude Allegre
Plate Tectonics has joined Darwinism as yet another scientific bulwark under attack in today's America, as shown e.g. at earthage.org, and I thought a review of a couple of popular books on the subject I enjoyed recently that give a very pleasurable overview of this field would be in order.
"The Summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone." John McPhee summarizes his tetralogy surveying the geology of the American continent with this phrase, indicating the depth of time, and the magnitude of forces involved in shaping the earth.
Fleshing this sentence out in the most wonderful fashion by following around a regional geological expert -- in this case Eldridge Moores -- and making the geology a personal story, while explaining technical terms by-the-by, and making the flow of time and movement of continents wash over the reader like a tidal surge, is a remarkable achievement.
_Assembling California_ is the most recently written of his geological tetralogy (gathered together in one volume now as _Annals of the Former World_), and shows the development of Plate Tectonics theory since its inception in the late '60s to the early '90s. One of the books indeed features a completely traditional geologist (_In Suspect Terrain_) who professes much doubt in the theory, while Eldridge Moores, on the other hand, is like a Plate Tectonics prophet, using the theory to explain virtually every geological feature on the planet.
This grumpiness and even hidebound intransigence of 'traditional geologists' who see their entire geological worldview literally swept away by the breathtaking scope of Plate Tectonic theory is a fascinating aspect of the human side of science shown in these books. McPhee himself notes this, referring to geosynclines -- a mainstay of the 'old' geology -- as "a rational fiction", and that "he is following a science as it lurches forward from error to discovery and back to error" (referring to an early mis-constructions).
A book I glanced through, _The Colorado Plateau : a geologic history_, by Daniel L. Baars, has an editorial-style Preface written by just such an annoyed 'old geologist', excoriating the "religious fervour" shown by adherents to the new theory. And I might add that, after reading several books with PT as a basis, I found this book (written in the '70s and re-printed), with it's 'old-style' terminology and complete lack of the plate-tectonic grand-scale overview of why such-and-such a geological feature is there in the first place, to be quite unreadable and boring in the extreme.
The other book in this review, _The Behavior of the Earth: Continental and Seafloor Mobility_, is neither boring nor unreadable, while providing an excellent historical approach to presenting PT theory, from Wegener to the current period (1988 was the date of publication, but this is no drawback from this general reader's perspective). It pays very welcome attention to the subject from a History of Science perspective, with careful attention to the scientists who provided each new advancement, while explaining the technical aspects of the theory with many pictures and diagrams. I found it an excellent supplement to McPhee's book, which mostly lacks visuals to fill out his word-pictures, and I referred many times to the seafloor-spreading and ocean-basin maps while reading McPhee. I don't know how available this book is now, but check the library anyway! Highly recommended.
rms
September 03, 2005 | |
No index, please
The comments of others largely capture the brilliant and compelling writing that makes this book a pleasure to read. I was sorry when I finished it. But please, no index, glossary, or anything else! This is a book for the layman. Even with a glossary, in six months we would forget the precise geological meaning of andesite. What is memorable about this book (and McPhee's other writing on geology) is that the geological terms flow around you and wash over you as if you were an expert in the field. Combined with metaphors that are startlingly original yet perfectly apt, the end result is a glimpse of the depth and possibilities for fascination under the surface story. Mundane details like definitions would make this book dry and boring, just another textbook. Instead, you get the big picture, told in a colorful and informative way, that leaves you educated about geology without feeling like a geologist.
August 27, 2004 | |
The Prose of Rock and Faultlines
With a precision of language and detail, John McPhee brilliantly evokes the terrain of earthquakes, desert, mountains, and coastline of California. McPhee's guide through the geological history and present-day is Eldridge Moores, a geological professor at UC/Davis who knows the land of California perhaps better than anyone and who can "see through the topography and see how the rocks lie in three dimensions beneath the topography." McPhee is Moores' interpreter, a writer for whom descriptions and metaphor comes as easily as geology does for Moores. Together, they take the reader through the diversity of land formations to form a complex understanding of all the forces that have been at work on this strip of land forming much of the west coast of the United States. For those only marginally interested in geology and topography, this is a difficult read, though it is well worth sticking with it. I myself read it in chunks, only a single chapter at a time, since any more tested my patience. The writing is superb, however, and the information imparted is both instructional and fascinating. When McPhee writes seemingly simple sentences such as, "There were orchards of carobs, figs, and pistachios, and an understory of prickly pears," he paints an entire countryside in just a few strokes of language. What he does with the drier subject matter of basalt and limestone is extraordinary.
June 04, 2004 | |
Bravo!
John McPhee is an essayist of significant talent. His ability to parse the technical into terms both enjoyable and understandable is literally striking. Turning a tome on geology into a page-turner must be one heck of a challenge, but McPhee manages to do so with regularity (see also: Rising from the Plains). Assembling California is no different. McPhee starts in the Sierra Nevada with geologist Eldridge Moores and ends on the San Andreas fault during the Loma Prieta quake. Throughout, McPhee explains that California is actually an accretion of exotic terrains that tectonically migrated throughout the eons. I'll admit that on rare occasion some content rendered me a bit glassy eyed, but the majority of the writing was excellent and the San Andreas fault section was beyond outstanding. Taken as a whole, Assembling California is a distinguished finale to McPhee's Interstate 80 geology series that began with Basin and Range and later became a compilation entitled Annals of the Former World.
July 12, 2003 | |
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