Annals of the Former World by John McPhee

            Annals of the Former World combines five books by John McPhee, the first four of which were published previously, into one volume.

            McPhee, a resident of Princeton, New Jersey, has been a writer for New Yorker magazine since 1978. Since 1975 he has been Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

            "Why would someone out of one culture try to make prose out of the other? Why would someone who majored in English choose to write about rocks? Why would a person who works for something called a Humanities Council and teaches a university course called Humanistic Studies 440 undertake to write about geology?" [page 7] "There seemed, indeed, to be more than a little of the humanities in the subject." [31]

            The result is the glimmer of the personalities of the author's traveling companions, the charm of the towns where they procured hotel rooms, and dialogues of speculation about the origins of the world. This is what's superimposed on the substratum (pun intended) of the original book idea to travel across North America and "write about rocks."

            Annals of the Former World is the culmination of a 20 year work in progress. It's based primarily on numorous trips, with five companions, along Interstate 80 from New York to San Francisco, " ... a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel." [5] The first of these trips was in 1978. However the conceptual journey of the book is "not linear", explains McPhee. "It begins in New Jersey and leaps to Nevada, because the tectonics in New Jersey two hundred million years ago are being recapitulated by the tectonics of Nevada today." [6] Indeed, Book 4, Assembling California begins and ends in California, but in between it reaches around the world to Greece.

            One of McPhee's companions is David Love, who works for the United States Geological Survey. Love's pet peeve is "black-box geologists" who lack field experience, and sit in offices and run computer simulations, because it's easy to do, and easy to get bureaucracies to fund it. [381-382] "The name of the game now is 'modelling'", he complains. "A lot of it I can't see for sour owl shit." [382]

            Another one of McPhee's colorful companions is Anita Harris, who, like Love, works for the USGS. She is cautiously critical of the theory of plate tectonics. The theory was relatively new and controversial in the 1960s, but now, although it still leaves numerous questions unanswered, it is taught as standard gospel in college and high school geology courses. Harris says, "I get all heated up when some sweet young thing with three geology courses tells me about global tectonics, never having gone on a field trip to look at a rock." [148]

            This model of the earth says that the crust of the planet is made of several solid plates floating on a semi-fluid mantle. The fluid underneath has convention, like the swirls in a pot of boiling water. This causes the plates to move relative to one another -- extremely slowly, in our own perception of time. Where the plates move apart, at the mid-Atlantic ridge, new ocean crust is formed by dense lava. Continents are higher than ocean crust because, being less dense, they float higher. The deformation where plates crash together -- so slowing that we don't see any motion at all in our lifetimes -- is the cause of mountains rising. (Such mountain-forming episodes are called orogenies.) Earthquakes and volcanoes appear where plates slide past one another, causing shear stress, or an edge of one plate is "subducted" beneath an edge of the other plate, producing a deep trench.

            Besides tectonics, the major shapers of the earth have been glaciation and erosion. Unlike the catastrophist view of Genesis, which had proposed world formation by means of few abrupt events, the newer uniformitarian view of creation says everyday processes like erosion brought the earth to its present state, imperceptibly slowly over unimaginably vast durations of time. Although it sound unbelievable, the Grand Canyon, a mile deep, ten miles wide, and 250 miles long, was produced by water erosion in the Colorado River. The present is the key to the past, as uniformitarians like to say.

            The vast time scales of the earth, since the planet solidified over four billion years ago, are divided into eras, eras are divided into periods, and periods are divided into epochs [tables of the geologic time scales, pages 667-701]. As other science popularizers have done before him, most notably Jacob Bronowski and Carl Sagan, McPhee invokes the analogy of the entire history of the earth visualized as one year -- "The Precambrian runs from New Years Day until well after Halloween. Dinosaurs appear in the middle of December and are gone the day after Christmas." [89]

Reviewed by Mike Lepore for crimsonbird.com

            And yet, McPhee has the objective of "doing a piece of writing that would describe not only the rocks exposed in roadcuts but the geologists with whom I traveled." [5] Therefore, before he says anything about geology, he comments on the bluejeans worn by his traveling companions. [19] He begins Book 3 by discussing the quaint communities and their earlier character as frontier towns in the old west [281-282]. McPhee is the sort of writer who hardly has to abandon the sensory impressions of the here and now just because he is also discussing events unfurling over unfathomable billions of years. Writing from the stream of consciousness, at the same time he's talking about the bedrock of the continent, he's talking about the food that hotel room service has just delivered to Cybill Shepherd, who's staying on the seventh floor. [616] I don't think any writer but McPhee could have pulled it off, but he does it superbly. He's not just a science writer; he's an artist who paints natural beauty with words, and his favorite subject is the story of our planet and the people who love it.