Basin & Range

Basin & Range - Paperback Basin and Range
Published by Farrar; Straus & Giroux
Hardcover: 0-374-10914-1; $
Paperback: 0-374-51690-1; $12.00US

Basin and Range is the first book in a series on geology and geologists, presenting a cross section of North America along the fortieth parallel, and gathering under the overall title Annals of the Former World. The second and third books in the series are In Suspect Terrain and Rising from the Plains.

Since his return from Alaska and the completion of Coming into the Country, John McPhee has been traveling with geologists, looking at roadcuts, listening to geological stories, and "trying to develop at least a rudimentary understanding of the long history and odd behavior of the planetary surface where our kind has made its sudden and alarming appearance.

The first result is Basin and Range, a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world--a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The Basin and Range is the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges green with junipers and often white with snow, a spectacular topography that is never evoked by people who dismiss it as "desert."

The Basin and Range is expanding, spreading. The sites of Reno and Salt Lake City have moved apart fifty miles in eight million years--to a geologist, a small amount of time. Two hundred million years ago, there was a Basin and Range province along what is now America's eastern seaboard. As it pulled apart, it produced the Atlantic Ocean.

Basin & Range - Hardcover On and off Interstate 80, the author traversed the Basin and Range with Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a professor of geology at Princeton who has been both an oil geologist and a chemical oceanographer and has also done extensive fieldwork in Nevada. With fascinating digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale, McPhee frames his setting and the rock and the people it contains. He calls geology "a fountain of metaphor." His awesome search through the annals of the former world has been, as much as anything else, a gathering of "metaphors by which to measure what we've done." Basin and Range is written with a quiet lyricism that is appropriate to the subject. It is a narrative that follows a majestic theme.

Reviews

In Basin and Range, McPhee is not so much a visiting amateur as a rhapsodist of "deep time"…The result is a fascinating book. -- Paul Zweig, The New York Times Book Review (front page)

One result of the trip west is an introduction to plate tectonics--probably the most readable summary extant. Geologists will find it sound, others will find it understandable and illuminating. -- Geotimes

He triumphs by succinct prose, by his uncanny ability to capture the essence of a complex issue, or an arcane trade secret, in a well-turned phrase. -- Stephen J. Gould, New York Review of Books

An exciting account of geology and the geologist, providing both an excellent history and an up-to-date snapshot of our science in the 1980s. -- Howard R. Gould President, the Geological Society of America

McPhee has taken on something that all of us--especially the American Geological Institute and its news magazine Geotimes--should take on: the explanation to non-geologists of what geology is all about. -- Wendell Cochran, Geotimes

The best popular portrayal of geology that I have seen in my thirty-two years of experience as a professional geologist. -- H. A. Kuehnert, Director, Worldwide Exploration, Phillips Petroleum Company