This 700-page five volume in one book is the first Pulitzer winner that failed me. I am not saying it is bad. Actually I can feel that it is a well researched book. So I started it with due respect and checked every unknown words by phone dictionary. In a page I marked up almost 20-30 such words, all about some kind of rocks that you will never meet again, such as jacupirangite, katzenbuckelite, phlogopite, despujolsite......

Trust me, I didn't give it up when it has a page filled with such rarely used words. But I already got a sense that the author may just lay them out to show off. Actually he is just a journalist, not someone trained as a real geologist. So, he is more likely to use such big words to prove something that he doesn't really know by training.

I decided to give it up when I enter book two. The five books are all the same structured. The author tells you something about a geologist, and how he traveled with the geologist on various road trips to “actually like a tour sighting” do fieldwork. And he weaved his descriptions with a lot of science discussion, human history of the place, and then what happened billion years ago. I quickly got lost with his pages and don't know why he is talking this in page one and turning to that in page two. And he tried to be fun and smart by using some poor jokes from here to there.

And he does so in way too many pages.

So I just very quickly like one eye ten line and finished it up. Because I dknt want to quit reading a book midway.

But it is really a torturous reading exoerience.. partly maybe because dou and lai are also around home and I don't have the patience to read such a style.

Reading this 660-page book on geology never felt like a chore. I found, as I was flipping through page after page about ophiolites and batholiths and supergene enrichments, hot spots and tectonic plate theory and glaciation events, the Archaean and the Proterozoic and the Cenozoic eras, transform faults and subduction zones and rift valleys, accreting island arcs and basin and range formations and valleys made entirely by wind, that I was not reading to learn, but reading to enjoy. That's because John McPhee has pulled off a miracle and has written the most beautiful piece of long-form lyrical prose I've ever read.

The point of the book isn't to teach you about geology - I still couldn't tell you the difference between granite and diorite (although it is mentioned in the book), or what the heck gabbro is, even though McPhee mentions it probably a hundred times. If you showed me a rock I would have no clue what it was called or what it was made of. The book's main aims are to tell you the story of the earth and to give you a sense of perspective. McPhee achieves this in part by telling you biographies on three scales - the human scale (biographies of the geologists he spends time with), the historical scale (histories of the places he visits), and the geological scale (geological history). There is very little structure in how he handles this, which could have gone badly but instead works really well and reinforces the way the earth tells its story - jumbled up yet beautiful. He also throws a good deal of geology concepts into the fray, building up from tectonic plate theory to hot spots to the accretion of island arcs onto continents. On top of all of this, the book is structured roughly from east to west, starting in NYC/the Appalachians, detouring to the basin and range formations of Nevada, heading to Wyoming and the Rockies, and ending in California (there is a small final chapter on the North American craton in the midcontinent).

I really couldn't get enough of McPhee's prose. Even though the book was really long and about a subject that every single one of my friends without exception has found to be aggressively boring, McPhee's writing is so beautiful and compelling that I found myself grateful that the book is 660 pages long and sad when it ended. Geology shapes so much of what's around us - by shaping geography, it has shaped history, and by shaping where we live, it has shaped how we see and interact with our environment - and yet most people have absolutely no idea - no perspective - of their place in space and time.

I'll use myself as an example, since I came in completely clueless. Let's start with a perspective of 'space', in other words, how geology affects our current lives. I never really understood the concept of bedrock before. Like, isn't the earth made of dirt? I mean, I knew that there's crust and mantle and that stuff, but why are you always guaranteed to have 'bedrock' somewhere down there? Why would you want to build the foundations of your house on bedrock? What is bedrock anyway? To start with, I never really even appreciated what 'dirt' is. Garden dirt is just organic matter. The 'dirt' I grew up around in California is actually clay - aka, former rocks that have been ground up into microscopic slivers, piled up into the hills of the nearby Santa Cruz mountains and eastern foothills, and washed by rain and rivers to fill up the Santa Clara Valley, making it into level ground convenient for habitation. Of course, if you could wash away all of that dirt, you would find that the surrounding hills continue downwards to form a deeper valley made entirely of rock. That's what the bedrock is. Moreover, even if you could turn the crust into dirt all the way down, the dirt at the bottom would be compressed into rock (this actually happens all the time, and those rocks, such as sandstone and limestone, are called sedimentary rocks because they formed from squished sediments). And you don't want to build on dirt/soil because that stuff has almost by definition washed off of higher ground and is still washing its way to the sea (also because it liquefies during earthquakes).
A cool example of 'space' perspective is the shape of the Manhattan skyline. Why are midtown and downtown full of tall buildings, but the area in-between has relatively low buildings? Part of the reason is because Manhattan island is made of Manhattan schist, a strong, hard rock. The schist is practically at the surface at midtown, but then dives below the surface until it comes back close to the surface downtown. So the buildings of midtown and downtown have strong bedrock that they can anchor themselves to, whereas the buildings in-between only have weak dirt.
One last 'space' example - India is in the middle of slamming into Asia, and the impact has been so strong that it is currently thought that it has caused the crinkling of a huge portion of the continent, including all of China up to Lake Baykal (which is partly why China is so mountainous). Not only that, but it is thought that the Indian impact has also bent all of Southeast Asia to the east, which can be seen in the way that the mountain ranges between the Himalayas and Southeast Asia bend from west-east trajectories to north-south trajectories.

Let me give an example of the 'time' perspective. The Appalachian mountains are actually the products of at least 3 'orogenies', or mountain-producing episodes. But the amazing thing is that on the geological scale, mountains don't actually last very long. Mother Nature is actually really freaking severe. When mountains form, huge rivers, and ice, and wind and storms form that slowly but surely tear the mountains down. So even though the Appalachians are made from three different orogenies, most of the earlier orogenies have been worn down to almost nothingness, only to be crinkled back up into mountains again by later orogenies. This is partly why if you don't live on a mountain, there's a high probability you're living on eroded bits of mountain - either the stubs of ancient mountains or mountain pebbles and powder that have been flushed to near-sea level by rivers.
Another example of 'time' is the ephemerality of the terrain as we know it. For example, the basin and range formations of Nevada (if you look at Nevada on a map, you will see it consists almost entirely of bone-dry north-south mountain ranges with basins in between) were once full of lakes (the Great Salt Lake is a salty remnant of a much bigger lake). But the basin and ranges (including the Sierra Nevada) are actually the result of the crust stretching in that area. So before the crust started to stretch, the land was actually mostly flat. There was no Sierra Nevada range, and great rivers ran from Nevada to the Pacific ocean. Land that once lay underwater now forms the peaks of snow-covered mountains. And it's like this all over the world, from the Rockies (large portions of the Rockies were lofted far into the sky by a mechanism that apparently is still unknown - and has since been disintegrating onto the Great Plains, raising the elevation of western Kansas and Nebraska by 3000 feet compared to their eastern sides) to Mt. Everest (whose peak consists of marine limestone).

Overall, this book accomplished what I desire in books - it changed the way I see the world. I would highly recommend this book to anyone, because it doesn't take any mathematical talent or hard thinking to experience this perspective shift. It just takes curiosity and an interest in the world around you.

I'll include a couple of paragraphs of one of my favorite passages from the book, in which McPhee describes the formation of Jackson Hole in Wyoming (I couldn't include all of it unfortunately because it's too long):
For all that is going on around it, the amount of activity at the site of Jackson Hole is relatively low. Across the future valley runs a northwest-trending hump that might be the beginnings of a big range but is destined not to become one. Miles below, however, a great fault develops among the Precambrian granites, amphibolites, gneisses, and schists—and a crustal block moves upward at least two thousand feet, stopping, for the time being, far below the surface. New volcanoes rise to the north and east. Fissures spread open. Materials ranging from viscous lavas to flying ash obliterate the existing topography. Streams disintegrate these materials and rearrange them in layers a few miles away. So far, these scenes—each one of which is preserved in the rock of Jackson Hole—have advanced to a point that is 99.8 per cent of the way through the history of the earth, yet nothing is in sight that even vaguely resembles the Tetons. The Precambrian rock remains buried under younger sediments. At the surface is a country of undramatic hills. The movements that brought the Overthrust Belt to western Wyoming—and caused the more easterly ranges to leap up out of the ground—have all been compressional: crust driven against crust, folded, faulted, and otherwise deformed. Now the crust extends, the earth stretches, the land pulls apart—and one result is a north-south-trending normal fault, fifty miles long. On the two sides of this fault, blocks of country swing on distant hinges like a facing pair of trapdoors—one rising, one sagging. The rising side is the rock of the nascent Tetons, carrying upward on its back the stratified deposits of half a billion years. One after another, erosion shucks them off. Even more rapidly, the east side falls—into a growing void. Magma, in motion below, is continually being drawn toward volcanoes, vents, and fissures to the north. Just as magma moving under Idaho is causing land to collapse and form the Snake River Plain, magma drawn north from this place is increasing the vacuity of Jackson Hole. As the magma reaches Yellowstone, it rises to the surface, spreads out in all directions, and in a fiery cloud rolls down from Yellowstone to bury the north end of the Tetons, where it splits and flows along both sides. The descending valley floor breaks into blocks, like ice cubes in a bucket of water. Some of them stick up as buttes.

This is an incredible book. That said it is also not an easy book to read. It's about the geologic hisory of the Earth. I found it fascinating and extremely educational. Others may not.

But it took me several months to get through it. It's 660 pages long, and is really 5 books in one. While it is lengthy I have read longer books in much less time. McPhee provides so much thought provoking material, I often would read only a few pages at a given sitting.

In addition, the book is packed full of geologic terminology. I have never had a formal course in geology, so the terminology was pretty much new to me. Yes, I was familiar with some of the most common terms such as the Cenozoic Era or the Mesozoic Era as well as sedimentary rock and igneous rock, but my knowledge didn't go much further. I frequently had to look up terms on Google, or simply semi-ignore them (I did both!)

Regardless, I learned a lot and have gained a much greater appreciation for the evolution of our planet, and the realization - which should not have been a surprise - that it continues to evolve and will do so long after humans are no longer around.

I read the book in overview mode. Some may want to read it for the details. Either way it is a worthwhile read.

McPhee also included a large number of interesting geologists that he met in the 20 years it took him to write the book. As only McPhee can do, these folks "came to life".

My sole criticsm: It would have been good to include a glossary of terms.

I think I have run up against the limits of my intelligence and found them, uh... limiting. This is a wild and informative and beautifully written book. BUT, if you're like me, your brain cannot encompass the morph-over-time that our dear old rocky earth performs. I kind of got the feeling that John McPhee himself had trouble with all that and set himself the goal of overcoming his own limitations. He spent many decades and many years doing so. Clearly, he loved both the characters and the very sound of the words involved - some real prose poetry here. But for those of us with less time to devote, it's all a little offputting. At the same time, the human stories (easier to relate to!) of geologists and (in one case) a geologist's Wellesley phi beta kappa mom on the frontier, were compelling.

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

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.

I read my first book by John McPhee earlier this year, "Oranges", after it was included in a short list of Books you can read in a day by the Economist Magazine.It was a fun read.  I was very impressed by his highly readable and amusing style, rather unique for non fiction subjects. So I decided to try his "Annals of the Former World" as the geological history of North America interests me. ( I'm a mechanical engineer and enjoyed my one course in Geology at University) Also, I knew McPhee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this book.
I had quite high expectations for it and I was not disappointed.  It's a big thick paperback that will take a long time to read in its entirety, but based on the first few chapters,  I highly recommend this book.

For me, five stars is a very rare accolade, as in good film reviewing.  This is a 'book of my lifetime' in the field of public science writing. I am amateur-passionate about geoscience but have no interest in America or even its geology. This author and monumental volume were unknown to me until recommended by Prof Iain Stewart in a late-night Inverness bar.  McPhee was a New Yorker writer of catholic interests, but must have devoted years not just to writing this tome, but to following Interstate 80 coast to coast, always in the company of a leading geologist in each domain it traverses. Their personal histories are integral, and emblematic of pioneer and immigrant America. His style is pure New Yorker, ramming home his key points by endless repetition and variation, verging on the turgid, but we end up knowing our stuff and all concerned. I don't need to go there now. A Pulitzer Prize is one thing, my award is for seeing me through a year of insomnia nights.

John McPhee takes the reader on an epic voyage across and into North America, as well as the field of geology, the lives and ideas of some of its practitioners, and into deep time. This book is a multi-layered, multi-textured reading experience featuring McPhee's enthusiasm for geology, human history, and the precise and illuminating use of language. A slow but rewarding read.

Very thorough overview of the geology of the United States of America. East to understand for non geologists as it is written by a writer with an interest in geology. It focusses on the geology found along interstate route I 80, crossing the United States from New York to California, covering the Appalachians, the great plains, the Laramie mountains and the Rockies, each with a different geologist who accompanies the author on his travels.

Annals of the Former World is an omnibus work consisting of four volumes focusing on the geology of the USA, together with a shorter essay, all written by John McPhee. It is nothing less than an extraordinary piece of writing - a non fiction book about a highly technical subject which is a genuine page-turner.
I have some advantage and bias here - I was a geologist for almost all my working life, but not in the USA and my direct experience was limited to only part of this wide and rapidly evolving science. So I had some advantages from my background and I was familiar with much of the terminology. But I found that I had no difficulty understanding the descriptions and explanations and arguments that McPhee constructed to create the tale of how the North American continent formed and grew. I think any interested person, perhaps assisted by a geological dictionary, will get as much form this collection as I did.
And it's not just a description of rocks and continent building. McPhee had the help of some truly exceptional field geologists who had spent their careers working with the rocks, and guiding future generations of earth scientists in the process. Their stories add to the interest of the book, and serve to break up the more technical sections. It also becomes apparent that McPhee has a bias towards those who have a hands-on relationship with the rocks - like most sciences geology has its "black box" people, but they need the field workers to hopefully guide them away from the howlers that laboratory people can make when they get too far from the real world.
The third main theme of the book is the history of the development of geological thought, and it's just as well written as the rest of the book. We need to keep in perspective that the science is only around 200 years old, and it started from an initial acceptance  that the bible provided a perfectly adequate understanding of the formation of the earth, and not a lot had happened since then. The pathway to our present understanding was fraught with controversy, and we haven't reached the end of it yet.
I learnt a lot from this collection, and I was reminded of things I had almost forgotten. I can't recommend it highly enough to anyone with an interest in the natural world and an inquiring mind.

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.