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    Assembling California
    Assembling California
    Assembling California
    Audiobook9 hours

    Assembling California

    Written by John McPhee

    Narrated by Nelson Runger

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.

    “A delicious field manual on the creation of the Golden State going back a few hundred million years.”—Peter Stack, The San Francisco Chronicle
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 29, 2011
    ISBN9781461811442
    Assembling California
    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 Assembling California

    4/5

    112 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      An exploration of geology especially . I learned that there are theories but that there is also observations that don't fit the theory.
    • 3/5
      Years ago I took a class on California geology (thinking it'd fill a physical science pre-req without having to take a lab (clever me)) and it, surprisingly, was one of the more interesting classes I'd ever taken.

      That said, my eyes did glaze over a bit reading some of the drawn-out descriptions of rocks and geologic formations in this book.

      That said, I really enjoyed McPhee's style and wit, especially when he mixed history into his writing. The section on the California gold rush was particularly compelling.

    • 4/5
      While the writing, as detailed in previous reviews, is finely wrought, the organization would benefit from less jumping around in both geologic and human time,and from place to place. Concrete sequential would have been welcome, from pre-history to the present.Even more important, unless a reader is a master of California political and geological locations, maps, illustrations, and photographs would have totally enhanced comprehension on many levels.A previous reader had thankfully tucked an old National Geographic map of California under the back cover of my abe.com book.As well, the small chunk of Andesite (from Mini Me Geology - odd that it doesn't list California as a site) kept me going through the geologically dense sections.If you benefit from word like these (quoting his companion Eldridge Moores) ="Americans look upon water as an inexhaustible resource.It's not, if you're mining it. Arizona is mining groundwater." and "A granite batholith will not appear just anywhere.You will wait an eternity for one to develop under Kansas."= you will love this fascinating book about how California joined the continent.An updated edition would be great!
    • 4/5
      Great book. I like a lot of McPhees, mostly the ones where he focuses more on the subject than on the people he's found to explain it; here, I even found the people chapters interesting, though the geology was more so. His primary explainer is a geologist who was in school before plate tectonics were an accepted theory, and had to deal with the new concepts almost immediately upon graduation; he did a very good job of presenting why plate tectonics took over so quickly and thoroughly, as they explained so many puzzles and mysteries that had no answers before. How mountains arose, why some rocks are tilted and others folded, where these different types of rock came from and how they come to be where they are...McPhee started in the Sierra Nevada, discussing the types of rocks and formations that are found in those uplifted ranges, then heads west, across the Central Valley and into the San Francisco Bay Area, where very different rocks and formations exist. The latter half of the book is a discussion of the San Andreas Fault system - the several identified faults that make up the boundary of the North American Continental Plate, as the Pacific Plate grinds along its edge, heading north-west. He discusses the different types of rocks and how they got there - how California, as we know it, is the result of several island chains crashing into the edge of the North American Continental Plate and becoming attached, adding new rocks, pushing old ones up or down, folding, tilting, and melting them into new formations. Interesting discussions of how visibly distinct types of rocks exist many miles apart along the faults, showing just how much the Pacific Plate has displaced northward - 60 to a couple hundred miles separate the same formations to the east and west of the fault. The last chapter is a detailed description of the Loma Prieta quake of 1989 - both from a geologic point of view, the epicenter's location and depth and the types of waves emanating from there, and a human point of view, illustrating what happened when the waves arrived in each location - the damage, or lack of same, that resulted. Fascinating, and horrifically amusing - the description, for instance, of the woman who, after the earthquake, looked out her third-floor window and saw a man's legs outside. Her building had pancaked into the first-floor garage, and her apartment was now at (or a little below) street level. A very enjoyable book, and I learned a lot.
    • 5/5
      I liked this book the best of all of McPhee's geology works. His explanations were easy to understand and his last chapter on the Loma Prieta earthquake was worth the price of the book.