This book has a rhythm unlike anything else I've read, just like geology has a timescale that takes some time to wrap your head around. It's like an opera. Geology and opera both have a reputation of being long and boring, but they are also majestic and complex. This book is long, but it's not boring!

For a while, when I first started this book, my three-year-old wanted me to read every other page to her--the words were like poetry. You can't read it quickly. Reading out loud helped me settle down to the book's pace. There are lots of big words: some of the geology geek persuasion, others of the English major nerd variety...but I wasn't constantly reaching for a dictionary. McPhee throws a new geology term at you, repeats it in multiple contexts so that you get a sense of the thing, and then offers a more complete definition, just in case you still need help. It's engaging.

At first I was a little bothered by the lack of photographs of everything. McPhee uses a thousand words to make a picture, but I still wouldn't recognize welded tuff if it was right in front of me. I wanted a modernized, six minute YouTube clip series complete with reality TV interviews with the geologists right at the road cut...I'm not sure I would have savored that as much though. And also, the ideas still get through. I don't want to be a geologist, and I don't need to memorize what all the rocks look like. But I have a much better picture of the complexities of the idea of plate tectonics, what it explains, what it doesn't. And while I'm sure some of the ideas presented in the book are dated, the big picture of geology hasn't changed too much from the public's perspective in the last twenty some-odd years.

Each book described some section of geology along Interstate 80, as well as the background of the geologist that McPhee accompanies during that stretch of land. (You really don't have to read the books in order, if you don't want to.) Rising from the Plains was my favorite. The geologist, David Love, had a childhood much like Ralph Moody (who wrote the Little Britches series), and Love's story is woven into the geology of Wyoming beautifully. What an adventure!

Nonfiction. The geologic history of the United States as discovered by studying its roadcuts. This book is large and heavy enough to be a weapon. It changes how you look at everyday surroundings. How you pass through the world. And your understanding of place, time, and impact. That's just for starters.

This was my mom's graduation present to me for an Earth Sci degree. It's pretty long and the geology is a bit outdated in places but it's pretty compelling. It's interesting to hear first-hand accounts of plate tectonics coming in to shake up the narrative. Not everyone was instantly convinced!

Based on my friend, Caterina's review of one of the books contained within this compilation, I think this might make an excellent gift for a young man I know.

For nearly 700 pages about half out of date geology, it's great. The best parts are the human interest stories. However, the geology bits, I'm not going to say I retained much of that information.

However, this book brought me a great number of excellent night sleeps. It absolutely hit the sweet spot for falling asleep - interesting enough that I'm happy to read it each day, dry enough that after 12 or 15 pages my eyes start to cross and I find myself reading sentences that don't exist on dreamy semi-hallucinated topics.

This is a collection of geology books. Each book focuses on a geologic province of North America, so there are five books describing the five geologic provinces of North America. McPhee pals around with the respective expert of each province and interprets the "big picture" of geology to us all. This book- these five books - tell a history of Earth which puts our own human existence in a different perspective. John McPhee is the king of scientific analogies. Very well done.

I loved this book. It took me probably 4 months in total and I had to put it down for 7 months from April to November because geologic time scales freaked me out Todd a while. But truly an accessible book on geology, and clearly a genre I wish I was reading more. I think it’s important to read this book and consistently be checking with yourself on what you need to google, it’s a practice at putting concepts to work in your mind. So fun to learn and imagine the building of our world. So good to be human.

One of the geologist-contacts of John McPhee explains the impact his professional life has on his perspective: "You care less about civilization. Half of me gets upset with civilization. The other half does not get upset. I shrug and think, So let the cockroaches take over." This, in a nutshell, is the escapism offered by this particular Pulitzer-winning magnum opus. Yeah, that CO2 buildup and our plastic debris will leave a permanent mark, but four billion years of rocks don't care about your pandemic anxiety.

The volume is a collection of five books written by McPhee between 1978 and 1999 aimed at describing not only the rock exposed in roadcuts across the United States but also the geologists with whom he traveled. Because I borrowed the e-book from the library, I confess I had no idea I was delving into such a massive volume until I was probably 30 pages in. But at that point, I was hooked. Not that I always knew what McPhee was talking about.

There was fatigued rock and incompetent rock and inequigranular fabric in rock. If you bent or folded rock, the inside of the curve was in a state of compression, the outside of the curve was under great tension, and somewhere in the middle was the surface of no strain -- the two sides were active in every fault. The inclination of a slope on which boulders would stay put was the angle of repose.

Jargon can be poetic.

There were festooned crossbeds and limestone sinks, pillow lavas and petrified trees, incised meanders and defeated streams. There were dike swarms and slickensides, explosion pits, volcanic bombs. Pulsating glaciers. Hogbacks. Radiolarian ooze.

And while I probably read the word batholith fifty times without ever bothering to look it up, through all the texture McPhee imparts wonderfully not only five books' worth of geological knowledge, he builds throughout the volume, offering deeper perspectives in the later books. The setup is far from linear. You don't start in the east and end up in California. You jump around. But you do benefit from the fact that in the 20-year period McPhee wrote these books, his understanding of the evolution of the field as the plate tectonics revolution unfolded also grew. Plate tectonics became universally accepted in the '60s, only a few years before the first volume was written. By the '90s, a flourishing of understanding based on technology including isotopes and gravity fields and magnetic fields had brought to light so much more than when he started.

One aspect of the writing that makes it come alive is the fact that it's about geologists as much as it's about geology. McPhee describes the geology only in the context of the dedicated men and women who live for the study. "We are blind men feeling the elephant," David Love, of the Geological Survey, has said to me at least fifty times, he writes, referencing the Hindu fable of the blind men touching only one small piece of the creature while trying to infer the whole of it. The foremost problem with the Picture is that ninety-nine per cent of it is missing -- melted or dissolved, torn down, washed away, broken to bits, to become something else in the Picture. The geologist discovers lingering remains, and connects them with dotted lines. Geologists "try to put the petals back on the flower."

The ideal scenario for reading this book would be during a cross-country trip across I-80. But absent that real field experience, I found myself pulling up countless YouTube videos to accompany my reading, which enabled me to better visualize a lot of what McPhee describes.

Plate tectonics is the star of the show, the framework around which everything else occurs. But the whole of the story is much more complex. Specific geologies are complex and messy. The Appalachians, for example, weren't simply formed the way the Himalayas are today, by two plates violently colliding. They were more the result of a schedule of arrivals of incoming exotic terranes – multiple collisions – over a long spread of time. "Hotspots" determine new island arcs and may even help cause continents to split. A thin crust and upraised mantle facilitate basin-and-range formation in Nevada today. Ice sheets set up and started Niagara Falls, moved the Ohio River, dug the Great Lakes. There was continental rifting below Nebraska and Iowa 1.1 billion years ago that stopped before it could turn to ocean. Pokagon State Park, Indiana is made of Canadian rocks, red jasper conglomerates from the north shore of Lake Huron, banded gray gneisses from central Ontario. Boston is African rock and the north of Ireland is American.

Some other morsels:

In any rock column, more time is missing than present, because erosion is a bigger driving force than orogeny (the building of mountains). And rock columns are more likely to commemorate a moment – a flood, an eruption – than to report a millennium. Like a news broadcast, it is more often a montage of disasters than a cumulative record of time.

I visited the Grand Canyon at the age of thirteen. The park is uniquely suited to hitting visitors over the head with what McPhee calls its "layer-cake" geology, a gorgeous and linear time scale. But geology is rarely so accommodating. Rock isn't just laid down. It is turned on its side or upside-down. It metamorphosizes and gets moved thousands of miles. It melds with other rocks. The complexity is staggering. The whole Appalachian system continually fed upon itself. There are Precambrian pebbles, in Silurian rock. You'll see Silurian pebbles in Devonian rock, Devonian pebbles in Mississippian rock. Geology repeats itself. Even the wind can play an outsized role in favor of erosion. McPhee describes how a substantial amount of erosion from the Rocky mountains might end up as dust blown by storms into the North Atlantic Ocean.

Oil deposits are correlated with conodont fossils of a particular hue. The presence of conodonts in the rock is an indicator of their being the right age, and the color of the fossils is in indication of the level of compression the rocks have undergone, a determinant of oil formation from carbon deposits.

California is in large part a collection and compactation of oceanic islands. The "Smartville arc" brought gold to California. Toward the end of the middle Jurassic – in the high noon of the dinosaurs, about a hundred and sixty-five million years ago – an island arc like the Aleutians or Japan had moved in from the western ocean and docked here. This was the third terrane at this latitude: the one that followed Sonomia and smashed into it with crumpling, mountain-building effects that propogated eastward turning soils into phyllites, sandstones into quartzites, siltstones into slates – the metamorphics we had seen up the road. In aggregate, the three terranes extended the continent by at least four hundred miles. The third one, suturing here, had doubled the width of what is now California. … If the story of California sounds fantastic, with all its accreting arcs and melanges coming up from the western sea, just look at a map of the southwest Pacific – look at the relationship between Australia and Indonesia right now.

[Hot spots] Great Meteor and Cape Verde seem to have lifted New England's high mountains, Bermuda the Smokies. Uplift accelerates erosion. The rock of the Permian period – the last chapter in the Appalachian mountain building story – has been removed everywhere in eastern America except in West Virginia and nearby parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania, halfway between the hot-spot tracks, halfway between New Hampshire and North Carolina.

An ophiolite is a section of the Earth's oceanic crust and the underlying upper mantle that has been uplifted and exposed above sea level and often emplaced onto continental crustal rocks. The presence of ophiolites – which we see in California, among other places – is a consequence of continental collisions with oceanic plates. One geologist likened the ophiolite to a cow on a cowcatcher in front of an old western train.

The earth as a whole is producing progressively less heat from radioactive decay, and that, at some point, is going to have a profound effect. In the future, the profound effect is going to be that the plates will stop moving.

The plate tectonics revolution isn't the only recent revolution in geology. The ability to identify the age of rocks is significantly more advanced than it was in the day when the presence of fossils were the main yardstick. Iron minerals line up like compasses, pointing toward the changing magnetic poles. Isotope decay rates are known and constant. Rock types can be identified by their magnetic signatures. The magnetic field is sampling the shallow crust, the upper few thousand feet. The gravity field is averaging, basically, the whole lithosphere. When you look at a gravity map you are seeing deeper features of the crust.

One problem with writing about science is that as any book is written, it immediately is threatened with obsolescence. McPhee observed, The thought occurs to me, not for the first time, that I am following a science as it lurches forward from error to discovery and back to error. But this is actually as much an asset of the writing as it is a detraction. I expect this volume will be worth reading even a hundred years from now because it is not just a textbook. It's written in the form of journeys, set pieces, flashbacks, biographical sketches, and histories of the human and lithic kind. And at the same time, it offers discovery and insight.

This entire book is an artifact from another era, an era when scientific writing for the general reader was undergoing some necessary upgrades. Unfortunately, that is exactly how it reads—as a stylistically interstitial relic.

In recent years, science writing has largely eschewed jargon, verbiage, and writerly flourishes—focusing instead on comprehension and simplicity. This book is not simple. It does not eschew verbiage, flourishes, or scientific nomenclature. Furthermore, it is cavalierly uninterested in aiding reader comprehension. After reading 660 pages on the geology of North America, my ignorance of the subject is undiminished.

I studied a little geology in college (in Wyoming, no less). I have traveled extensively throughout North America, and the terrain covered in the book (I-80 and environs, principally) is quite familiar to me. Yet I often could not picture in my mind’s eye what McPhee was describing. For whatever reason, this book was published with almost no visual aids. That is inexcusable for a deeply complex book about geology, let alone one ostensibly written for the general reader. Wikipedia entries on lithospheric phenomena are pure pleasure reading by comparison.

There were, to be sure, portions of text that were smooth, enlightening, and easy to follow. Such section were rare. Midway through the book, I switched from a paperback to a Kindle version because the ability to look up obscure terms became essential. Why? Because McPhee does nothing whatsoever to ensure the reader understands what he’s talking about. He just throws scientific terms at you as if they are in everyday use and moves on. He says that something “inclines” but doesn’t tell you what he’s referring to, where it is, or what the “incline” is inclined toward.

This book (which is really five books in one) has many fans and it has won many prizes. Well done. I found it exhausting.

John McPhee is a goddamn poet. This book is about geology, which might sound boring, except that it, like geology itself, brings the world around us to life. It makes you look at a mountain and think “that giant piece of rock is actually pretty young when you think about it”.

When I moved to New York a number of years ago, I would tell people I was a geologist, and they would tell me how much they loved John McPhee's books. I had never heard of him, and decided to check out his book at the library.

The story follows J.D. Love, a well known geologist from Wyoming, who I was familiar with, and sort of a roll-call of the formations and landscapes of Wyoming and the rocky mountains. For the most part it was boring as hell! There was a bit of comedy in the New Yorker retaining stories of the Wyoming geologist, but a lot of poetic verbiage that just put me to sleep. Sorry, geology is more about processes than names...

If I knew more about geology I might give this a 5, but I don't so I didn't. For the average joe to pick this up and read through it would be a battle - especially if the subject doesn't interest him. But as Dennis Hopper said to Chris Walken in True Romance "this shit fascinates me." Different subject matter - same principle. I've always liked rocks and the thought of what went on before we got here - why things are the way they are - and what is going to continue long after we are gone has a certain appeal. There's a certain comfort that comes in reading about something that doesn't give a shit about the Dow Jones, ISIS, Obama, American Idol and the Superbowl. It's a planet doing it's thing and there's nothing you can do to stop it. It's not a predictive science. The geologic history in this book is interwoven with man's history in this country as it relates to the areas across a specific latitude of the US. Though there is a lot of rocks to wade through I really enjoyed the book. I probably didn't absorb much of the various delineations of geologic time aside from Precambrian and everything that came after - but in context to how long people have been around - it really puts things in perspective. The the history of earth were the length of "Stairway to Heaven" we would be part of of one of the syllables of Plant's last utterance of the word Heaven as the song ends - maybe not even that much. There were some very eye opening things that I never knew about as well as far as how North America came together. I was always under the impression that we just sort of floated away from Pangeia or the first continent and that was it - apparently not. The chapter on California was really interesting as well regarding faults and earthquakes, the gold rush, etc. It was just a really cool book if you like earth sciences. If you don't? stick with a novel because this will be some work for you.