Book read for a Place Based Literature Action Book Club. A good combo of geology and learning about someone's upbringing and subsequent life's work in this geology. Could not be more Placed Based. Author drives around Wyoming with Geologist David Love (1913-2002) - one of the last great field geologists. David was born near Riverton Wyoming. His parents, John & Miss Waxman built up and lost everything several times due to blizzard, flood, drought.Lived very rural. David mentions his childhood neighborhood. A neighborhood for me growing up was a couple blocks. Now that I live in rural Kansas - my neighborhood is a 5-6 mile radius. For him - he mentions his neighborhood at 10's of miles! Growing up he was surrounded by and naturally absorbed his geological surroundings in just his everyday living. Lots of interesting stories of his growing up - his ranch life, hosting murderers from time to time, his education. There were three children and they all went to college. Allen - Civil Engineering, David Geology with a PhD from Yale, and Phoebe - a chemist. Every period of geologic time in the history of the world is present in Wyoming. Spent his whole career piecing together the Jackson hole, Tetons, Rocky Mountain geologic story. Grad school - studied a 500 square mile area Northwest of his childhood ranch. Seemed like his career was a catch-22 in that he loved being out in nature and had an apprciation for nature, but at the same time he was a scientist and lot of the things he discovered went on to be used to "trash" the environment. David discovered major uranium deposits. Helped discover oil, gas, coal deposits. Could have been paid a lot of money from the private sector, but always stayed working for the US Geologic Survey from 1942-1987. Thought my head was going to explode several times trying to keep straight all the uplift, erosion, faulting, folding, hot spots, and plate tectonics. Do know I do want to drive on The Plank!

After reading about David Love and the geology of Wyoming I see why so many geologists say Rising From The Plains is their favorite geology book. It might be mine as well. From hearing about the Laramide Revolution to the Yellowstone Hotspot to Jackson Hole to the Wild Bunch and John Muir this book really has it all. It even covers topics I've learned about in my research such as how uranium forms in sedimentary environments and the exhumation of mountains. It also covered flood basalts and super eruptions made by the Yellowstone Hotspot, which is what I wrote a thesis on. David Love also has an incredible family history. He is a direct descendant of Wyoming's settlers, related to a member of the Wild Bunch, and John Muir was also his great Uncle. David Love also an incredible geologist that turned Wyoming in a uranium boom state and was a first author in the geologic map of Wyoming twice. I highly recommend this book if you're interested in rocky mountain geology.

You might also enjoy:

✱ Coming into the Country
✱ Earth: An Intimate History
✱ Underland: A Deep Time Journey
✱ The World in a Grain
✱ Listening Point
✱ The Yosemite
✱ An Owl on Every Post
✱ The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

Considering that I don't particularly like or seek out non-fiction, I have read quite a bit of this author's oeuvre. All of it excellent. This is no exception.

I am having the most difficult time reading this book. I'm not an unintelligent person, but the subject matter is not grabbing me.

What attitude is one supposed to take to connect with these men? I'm not finding it. Someone please help.

A writer and a geologist drive around Wyoming, the latter reminiscing about his days growing up there, and identifying the geological birth and development of the region. The writer is McPhee, waxing eloquently as usual. A most interesting sojourn.

Enjoyed history of Love Ranch, David Love's path through a career in geology inspired by growing up around visible geologic formations, and the story of his parents more than the multitude of geologic terms and descriptions, which are generally confusing and foreign to me.

However, I learned a lot and picked up McPhee's Basin And Range (now faded on the shelf) after being unable to get through it the first time years ago, again due to lack of knowledge of geology terminology. More interesting this time having been primed by reading Rising.

Part of my reasoning to attempt Basin again was being in the rhythm of McPhee's style, thinking the familiarity will help me get through Basin. I have tended to read multiple books by an author consecutively, enjoying their style across stories.

Rising from the Plains is my third McPhee book in the Annals of the Former World series. The topographical subject, the Rockies, happens to be the area which sparks the most interest. I've hiked through many of the areas McPhee writes about. Fond memories of my times in nature abound as I read about his travels with geologist David Love. If there were ever a 20th century man of, for, and about the state of Wyoming, it is Love. Of the backstories in the series thus far, I found his the most entertaining and engaging.

As usual, the interleaving of human and geological history transforms a very dry subject into one filled with intrigue. Love's contributions via the USGS are to this day without compare. He unfortunately drew the ire of environmentalist groups due to some of his contributions on petroleum discovery. I feel McPhee takes a respectful, humanistic approach to the travails of engimatic folks like Love. After finishing the book, I am so inspired to again hike through the Grand Tetons, to peer down and walk through hundreds of years of history.

I confess it was a struggle sometimes to stay oriented in time. The unfamiliar terminology and frequent jumps in geological time were at times daunting. I highly recommend keeping handy a geologic time scale. Also crucial is understanding the relationships between Eras, Periods and Epochs. Memorizing the above for the last 500MYA will better prepare you to flow through the book rather than stop every half page or less. This book and the series at large are both a layman's challenge, and a compelling narrative. I am very looking forward to the last two books in the series.

Geology is simultaneously mystifying and compelling to me—as vast and mysterious as space except we’re walking around on it. This was fascinating to me how one geologist in Wyoming has built so much of our understanding (well, science’s understanding) of what has gone on here over millions of years. Not a traditional geology book by any means, though.

The wild west snippets were great. I actually have a geology degree and I struggled with the rock descriptions, some diagrams and photos would have been good. The narrative and structure of book shifted completely for the last 50 pages into a sort of textbook. I wouldn't reread this book, maybe if I was going to Wyoming. The author struggles to create a feeling of place with the constant place names and changes in time period.

This is the third installment as I work my way through Annals of the Former World. In Rising from the Plains, I was expecting a breakdown of my perennial question, as a Front Range resident, "how did the Rocky Mountains get there?" The Rockies are especially intriguing as, unlike the Alps, Andes, and Himalayas, there are no continental plates crashing into each other along fault lines. I had long assumed that volcanic action was behind it, but that's not accurate either. I'm not sure my questions have been answered in this book, and I may need to invest in more recent geology books to find a better answer. I know now that the Pikes Peak granite batholith was formed from slow-cooling magma deep underground 2 billion years ago, and at some point in the last however many million years, the batholith rose up through the sedimentary crusts, leaving a stripe of lovely vertical sandstone monuments all along the Front Range, from the Boulder Flatirons to the Garden of the Gods.

However, this book only briefly touched on this. This book is about the wild and confusing geological mess marvel that is Wyoming, interspersed with the history of geologist David Love's homesteading family who came to the state in the late 1800s. I enjoyed these historical sections a lot, especially coming off the pioneer classic My Ántonia (one of the ranch hands in that book was even a stage coach driver in Wyoming, making me wonder if he crossed paths with David Love's mother Ethel, who travels to the state via stage to be schoolmarm in the literal wilderness). Rising from the Plains echoes Ántonia also in its examination of the transformation of the West, in this case via uranium mining and oil extraction, ending on the melancholy image of the ancestral Love Ranch, derelict and abandoned within site of the uranium strip mines.

I was at first skeptical about the amount of space David Love’s childhood was taking up in the narrative, and I wondered if maybe it was because present-day David Love wasn’t as interesting a character as the geologists the first two volumes focused on, so McPhee went for some dramatic frontier adventures instead.

But really it’s because David Love’s childhood in Wyoming was quite directly formative of his career as a geologist. And also probably, having discovered the clear connection (and wealth of source material), John McPhee couldn’t resist some dramatic frontier adventures.