While studying general Wyoming history I learned by happy happenstance of John McPhee's 1986 book Rising From the Plains, which unfolds the geological story of the state from the perspective of those American Western pioneers and their descendants who have inhabited the land for the last century. Wyoming geologist David Love is McPhee's focal point. It's challenging to pin down this book. It's a portrait of Wyoming's geology, but also of David Love and his family, and occasionally it's more free-flowing nature writing. While McPhee's material is arranged in a distinctively unusual, if not idiosyncratic, manner, his writing is lovely and always riveting. Even if you are, like I, essentially ignorant of the fundamentals of geology, this book is sure to come as a revelation. I cannot imagine how anyone who discovers this book can fail to be moved by the stateliness of Love's chosen field of study, or by the greater story that the adventure of science collectively has to unfold.

Through a second act of synchronicity while reading this book I stumbled across Ken Burns' 1996 PBS video series called The West. Episode 8 contains extended interviews with David Love in which considerable portions recounted in McPhee's book are recounted. I would advise anyone who enjoys this book to seek out that documentary as well.

In Rising from the Plains, John McPhee takes us on an exciting and fascinating road trip throughout Wyoming with geologist David Love. The first half of the book is a beautiful blend of Wyoming geology, and the history of Love’s family as they move into the Wind River Basin region in the early twentieth century. The second half of the book continues with geology of the Rocky Mountain region, but also includes a high-level look at the United States and how it affected western geology.

I enjoyed McPhee’s descriptive writing style. He has a way of transporting you back in time millions of years with his vivid descriptions of flora and fauna. In the beginning of the book is a map of Wyoming showing the different geological areas and a chart outlining the different eras. I’m a sucker for a good map, and I found the chart extremely helpful. My only complaint was the lack of paragraph breaks. Sometimes entire pages were one long paragraph, and for me this made reading a bit of work. I know this is petty, but it was enough of a distraction for me that I felt I needed to mention it.

If you love geology and western history, I would highly recommend this book!

John McPhee is truly a unique and special author. The nonfiction books that were eventually bound into the tome “Annals of a Former World” comprise his magnum opus. “Rising From the Plains” is one of those books. It follows the geologist David Love across Wyoming, and describes history both geologic and human. Love is fascinating and conflicted, with a character and background that could be written into a novel. Love’s mother and father are also described in this book, which helps to root the quintessential Wyomingness of the story. This book contains lovely descriptions of the Wyoming landscape and how the world looked millions of years ago. It contains the stories of boom and bust Wyoming, with its cycles of cattle, oil, and uranium. It contains the human dimensions of the ancient and harsh landscape, including true melancholy for what has been lost. This is a fantastic book, though not for everyone. If you like geology and the human stories that surround it, then it is very much worth your time.

If you’re lucky, you’ve had the chance to get to know somebody truly inspirational, someone who just seems to belong to a different category of humanity than us normal folk. This book has three such people: A geologist named David Love; a frontier wife named Ethel Waxman; and of course the author himself, John McPhee. Arguably, the book is primarily about geology, but that’s a very limited interpretation. For many years, this was my favorite book, and re-reading it twenty years later, I realize I was right: This is marvelous.

McPhee has made a career of writing about interesting, highly-accomplished people. What sets this book apart is love – he really seems to love the people he’s profiling. (While this is blatantly obvious in the text, be assured I’m not making this up – he stated as much in an interview.) What can be more pleasurable than reading a brilliant writer writing about people he loves and admires?

McPhee got his hands on the unpublished diaries of a young woman who made a life for herself in the emerging state of Wyoming in the early 1900’s, and it’s riveting reading. Miss Waxman is an impressive example of humanity – top of her class at Wellesley, an excellent horsewoman, she became a schoolteacher – the only schoolteacher, in fact – in Fremont County, Wyoming in 1905. (Fremont County is about the size of New Hampshire, and she had only a dozen students, some of whom had a three-hour commute by horse.) Women were so scarce in the region that a stranger found a glove she’d dropped on the prairie twenty miles from her ranchhouse, but quickly figured out who the owner must be and returned it. David Love was a down-to-earth guy (literally -- he slept outdoors about 1/4 of his life, given the nature of his work.) He also knew more about Rocky Mountain earth science than anybody living back then, probably, and is a good explainer.

So many “romantic” books are all about the period leading up to a marriage…Having now been married myself for twenty-six years, having raised a family, I think romance in the decades after the wedding has been given short shrift in literature. But the story told here is full of romantic touches, in the broader sense of the term. Here’s Ethel writing about an outing with her two sons, after harvesting wild hay:

My husband liked to have me ride with them for the last load. Sometimes I held the reins and cried, “Whoa, Dan!” while the men pitched up the hay. Then while the wagon swayed slowly back over the uneven road, I lay nestled deeply between my sons in the fragrant hay. The billowy white clouds moving across the wide blue sky were close, so close, it seemed there was nothing else in the universe but clouds and hay.

Of course, not every day on the ranch was this calm. Working with large animals always carries the potential for danger:

“The bull broke into the high granary," wrote Waxman. "Our only, and small, supply of horse and chicken feed was there. Foolishly, I went in after him and drove him down the steps…” The bull actually charged her in the granary and came close to crushing her against the back wall. She confused it, sweeping its eyes with a broom. It probably would have killed her, though, had it not stepped on a weak plank, which snapped. The animal panicked and turned for the door. (In decades to follow, her husband never fixed the plank.)

Spending time with the characters in this book is quite simply a joy. Even better that they aren’t fictional, and there are people alive today who remember these folks and call them"grandma" and “grandpa”.

Of course, there’s a great deal about geology here as well. The book is set almost entirely in Wyoming, which has long been my bolt-hole when I grow tired of civilization. If you’re at all interested in Mother Earth, there’s something of interest in every corner of the state, and this book provides a thorough and illuminating overview. It just so happens that Wyoming is a perfect place to study just about every geologic process known, and Grand Teton National Park contains the most complete and complex geologic record of any place in North America. At the time this book was written, the exact process by which the Rocky Mountains arose was still a substantial mystery, an odd puzzle among the world’s mountain ranges. Maybe geologists have figured it out since then, but unless we come up with another science writer of McPhee’s caliber to explain it, I don't wanna hear it.

Wow! McPhee writes steadily and determinedly of the geologic eons on display in the tortured topography of Wyoming, but just as the reader begins a yawn, he spins a tale from the colorful life of the state’s renowned geologist, David Love. These tales are a series of vivid vignettes of Wyoming’s pioneer and cowboy past; sharper even than the bright mineral outcroppings the author visits with the aged and venerable field geologist. The chronicle of their drive along the road cuts of Interstate 80 ought to be required reading for every student at the University of Wyoming.

A continuation of the author's explorations into America's geological history with notable geologists.

In this edition McPhee shadows David Love, telling the story of his parents and how they arrived in Wyoming and created their family. We understand why Love is a bit of a polymath and why he focuses so much on observation.

The geologic history of the Rockies is told in terms of a journey on Interstate 80 east from Nebraska to Utah. This narrative tends to be a bit more disjointed than some of the other narratives from the author, but he does well at giving a 40,000' view at the end.

Fascinating consideration of how the Rockies rose from the Plains.

Mildly interesting homespun tales of life in Wyoming over the last century. Mostly about Love's geological research in the area. Not terrible, but also not very well written.

This book is like Madam How and Lady Why on steroids. The geology of Wyoming is quite fascinating. While some of it went over my head, I now want to find someone local who knows about these things. All the references to the wind made me laugh (or cry), and I enjoyed the story that was woven through it all.

I love the information, but there was much biographical info on Mr Love and his family, that the book could have been half its length. The geology was still very good, I learned so much from this series so far. It’s still an excellent work. Great book!

I'm just never going to be able to get through the geology series.

I enjoyed McPhee's approach. How do you give an audience a taste of Wyoming's geological importance? McPhee chose to take the reader through a series of conversations with the most prominent geologist in Wyoming, the West, and maybe even in the United States, Robert Love.

Most interestingly, the author began this tapestry of conversations with a story about the geologist's family roots and how they came to establish the Love Ranch in the middle of Wyoming. Not only was McPhee able to share a glimpse of Wyoming's geological history, but it's social history as well.

I would have enjoyed more insight into Wyoming's geological phenomena and how it shaped the people of Wyoming, and less tangents about the future of the profession of geology, or the validity of a theory of 'hot spots'. I enjoyed an introduction of Wyoming geology, but I was left wanting more.

so much fun. as much a portrait of Wyoming throughout the 20th century as a geological exploration of the state. some of the stories are preposterous, but highly entertaining regardless. at points i felt as though i was hearing the plot of a western recounted to me. lovely prose, as usual. David Love himself is remarkable as well: geologist, grand-nephew of John Muir, an outdoorsman from childhood, an incredibly witty man.