Annals of the Former WorldAnnals of the Former World
A multilayered tale, arranged in an organic succession of set pieces, flashbacks, biographical sketches, and human and lithic histories, explores North American geology, plate tectonics, and geologic time. 20,000 first printing.
Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross-section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with.
Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a many-layered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it, guided by twenty-five new maps and the "Narrative Table of Contents" (an essay outlining the history and structure of the project). Read sequentially, the book is an organic succession of set pieces, flashbacks, biographical sketches, and histories of the human and lithic kind; approached systematically, it can be a North American geology primer, an exploration of plate tectonics, or a study of geologic time and the development of the time scale.
Collects several pieces which originally appeared in The New Yorker along with a new chapter, completing McPhee's 20-year geological exploration of a cross-section of North America. Traveling piecemeal along the 40th parallel, he explores the knowledge and personalities of his various companions--including geologist Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton University, the sedimentologist Karen Kleinspehn, Anita Harris and David Love of the US Geological Survey, and the tectonicist Eldridge Moores of the University of California, Davis. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years
Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World.
Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction.
Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
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- New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
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