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    Basin and Range
    Basin and Range
    Basin and Range
    Audiobook7 hours

    Basin and Range

    Written by John McPhee

    Narrated by Nelson Runger

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is 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 title refers to 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 that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting fora lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.

    “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

    Includes an interview with the author
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 3, 2004
    ISBN9781440782411
    Basin and Range
    Author

    John McPhee

    John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written over 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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    Reviews for Basin and Range

    4/5

    160 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      John McPhee's first part of the Annals of the Former World collection is stunning. It's tough, gritty and full of words that feel as good to read as the taste sour lollipop. To me, geology is mystifying, fascinating, and as McPhee so eloquently lays out, full of poetry. This is a lovely book of prose about the earth, deep time, and a brief history of the field of geology.
    • 2/5
      Few writers can successfully mingle fiction writing with natural history, and of these, writers with an interest in pure geology are just a fraction. In «Basin and Range» John McPhee tries to forge a novel out of geographical description and fiction, unfortunately not quite successful enough, thus the natural history writing remains too distinct, a mere relating of facts without a deeper dimension.
    • 2/5
      What a poorly written book. I've covered about 1/4 of it and don't know if I can stick it out. Facts are constantly delivered with no background, definition of words or concepts. It jumps all around, is just incomprehensible.

      This "author" has no concept of how to tell a story, much less a complicated technical story.

      What disappointment.
    • 1/5
      This was a Kindle book, so I couldn't rip it up like one person who intensely disliked the book. Author's academic stream of consciousness is not understood by the average reader (me). I should have been forewarned in this example from the publisher's review: "...lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions..." In that sentence, there are at least three words that require a dictionary and all sentences are like that. This book did not contribute much to my knowledge of geology.
    • 5/5
      Flabbergasting, the science of geology told artfully. I am gobsmacked by the geologic megapicture. There is a most surprising confession two thirds of the way through this book, an encounter I won't spoil but the most convincing account I've personally heard regarding things inexplicable. McPhee shares the moment with his pal, a professor at Princeton, and a hundred locals. Which is more unlikely, the Earth, the stars, or consciousness itself!?
    • 4/5
      "What did you do when you were a kid?"
      I sure as hell didn't read geology books...
    • 3/5
      Interesting if you are interested in geology of North America.
    • 4/5
      This a great book for anyone interested in the great basin which includes Nevada, eastern California, western Utah, southeastern Oregon, Northern Arizona, and southern Idaho.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this very much. McPhee has a lovely, engrossing style of writing. I got odd echoes of other books I've enjoyed throughout this one - he repeatedly uses the theme of traveling back and forth over an area over millions of years, and the phrase "If you turned around and came back, a million years later" kept reminding me of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics (a book I love). Other areas, where he was talking about glaciers and their effects and the discovery of their actions, reminded me of a textbook I've owned and read and reread for years - Prehistoric America by Anne Terry White. I learned quite a bit about the underlying structures of areas I'm familiar with - the titular Basin and Range area is fascinating, and the idea that Auburn, California sits on what was once the edge of the continental shelf is amazing. He does, occasionally, go off in transports about the words and phrases of geology, without explaining the meanings behind them, but I recognized enough to more or less follow even in those areas. And one bit, talking about 'new' types of rocks discovered through microscopic and chemical analysis, explained some puzzles I've run into elsewhere - words that meant nothing to me though they were obviously types of rocks. Now I know they were fine distinctions of granite, slate, limestone, etc. Very enjoyable book - I'll look for his other geology ones, now, and see what other subjects he's covered.
    • 4/5
      An engrossing study of one of the prevalent land forms of the American West. John McPhee offers a brain-pleasing amalgam of science, culture, and sheer storytelling talent.
    • 3/5
      I've enjoyed John McPhee's other essays, but found this one disappointing.I think the problem is that McPhee, as he admits, loves the poetry, the sound of geology. This love of the sounds gets in the way of his actually explaining things in a useful fashion. As a primary example, the book could use some maps and diagrams. (Although I listened to the audiobook, I own Annals of the Former World and looked in it, unsuccessfully, for diagrams that might elucidate what I heard in the car.)Along the same lines, the book really needs some with explanations of exactly what the various rock terms used mean and, more importantly, what their significance is.Finally the standard set pieces on deep time and plate tectonics are somewhat tiresome to anyone who knows this stuff.The one interesting fact I learned that was immediately processable was that over 50% of mineral deposits are hydrothermal --- water dissolves a motley collections of various ions, then, when the temperature and pressure are just right, a particular species of salt will precipitate out, forming a vein of some mineral.There was enough interesting to justify reading or listening to the others essays in Annals of the Former World, but that's pretty much only because I feel I need to learn more geology, explained from a variety of angles.