Assembling California

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Summary: Test book writers could take lessons from John McPhee
Review: I read the series in the New Yorker. When the book published a short time later, I bought the book, read it gave it to a friend, who gave it to a friend and so forth. Bought another copy which I gave to my daughter's third grade teacher. So I am on my third copy, but found value from re-reading this book several times. I now go by quarries and road cuts wishing I could stop and get the understanding of what is happening in the geology. This is our world and McPhee does an excellent job of allowing us to understand how it works. .

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Summary: The dean of literary non-fiction assembles California
Review: In Assembling California, John McPhee has once again shown why he has been described as the dean of literary non-fiction. As he unfolds the geologic story of the state, he manages to seamlessly weave two time scales--geologic and human--into a single compelling story. It is a geology text packaged as literature that will leave you thinking "if all geology texts were written like this, I might have majored in geology." Like his earlier books in the series, starting with Rising from the Plains, he has latched onto an expert geologist and followed him across the globe. One difference is that Rising from the Plains was as much a story of the geologist as the geology. In Assembling California, Eldridge Moores serves primarily as the teacher rather than also as a subject. It isn't always an easy read. When terms like syncline, ophiolite, diabase dikes, and subduction zones are flying at you fast and furiously, even readers with technical backgrounds will frequently have to come up for air. The book cries out for two additions: a glossary and an index. In their absence, you are well advised to take detailed notes. Some of the descriptions would also have benefitted from good illustrations. (The few diagrams included illustrate rather basic points.) Overall, however, McPhee does an excellent job of casting light on what is often considered an arcane subject.

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Summary: The Prose of Rock and Faultlines
Review: With a precision of language and detail, John McPhee brilliantly evokes the terrain of earthquakes, desert, mountains, and coastline of California. McPhee's guide through the geological history and present-day is Eldridge Moores, a geological professor at UC/Davis who knows the land of California perhaps better than anyone and who can "see through the topography and see how the rocks lie in three dimensions beneath the topography." McPhee is Moores' interpreter, a writer for whom descriptions and metaphor comes as easily as geology does for Moores. Together, they take the reader through the diversity of land formations to form a complex understanding of all the forces that have been at work on this strip of land forming much of the west coast of the United States.

For those only marginally interested in geology and topography, this is a difficult read, though it is well worth sticking with it. I myself read it in chunks, only a single chapter at a time, since any more tested my patience. The writing is superb, however, and the information imparted is both instructional and fascinating. When McPhee writes seemingly simple sentences such as, "There were orchards of carobs, figs, and pistachios, and an understory of prickly pears," he paints an entire countryside in just a few strokes of language. What he does with the drier subject matter of basalt and limestone is extraordinary.