Assembling California

February 1, 1993
In his usual clean, graceful prose, McPhee takes readers on an intensive geological tour of California, from the Sierra Nevada through wine country to the San Andreas fault system, a 50-mile-wide swath of parallel fault lines. Through talks with his traveling companion, geologist Eldridge Moores, McPhee introduces the reader to current geological controversies, and surveys global plate tectonics--the collision and rearrangement of land masses ever since the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea eons ago. The duo also travel to Arizona, where Moores grew up pushing ore carts in his family's gold mine, and to Cyprus and Greece, where rock from the ocean floor has been tossed up to form continents. McPhee looks at the conjectural science of earthquake prediction and gives an account of a recent San Francisco quake. His leisurely excavation meanders from Mexican explorer Juan Bautista de Anza's settlement of San Francisco in 1776 to 1850s gold-mining camps to the summit of Mount Everest, made of marine limestone lifted from a shelf that once divided India and Tibet. With this volume McPhee concludes his Annals of the Former World series, which he began with Basin and Range (1980). Illustrated.

The last of John McPhee's four-volume Annals of the Former World provides a layman's look at plate tectonics. McPhee follows California geologist Eldridge Moores over the maze of faults which makes California America's most recent geologic puzzle. The book is exciting, if rambling, and demands some familiarity with geography and recent geologic terminology. Runger's presentation is slow enough to enable the listener to process most of the technical intricacies while at the same time lively enough to make the narrative passages interesting. Some materials, though, with their maps and diagrams, are better left in written format. This might be one. P.E.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine