Assembling California » (First Edition)

John McPhee -- a writer with The New Yorker since 1965 -- writes about most anything that piques his interest, from California geology to the arc of a tennis ball to the construction of a birch-bark canoe. His beautifully articulated structures, clear prose, and participatory voice have become a model for other literary journalists, Norman Sims wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

A cross-section in human and geologic time, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps, in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.

Publishers Weekly

In his usual clean, graceful prose, McPhee takes readers on an intensive geological tour of California, from the Sierra Nevada through wine country to the San Andreas fault system, a 50-mile-wide swath of parallel fault lines. Through talks with his traveling companion, geologist Eldridge Moores, McPhee introduces the reader to current geological controversies, and surveys global plate tectonics--the collision and rearrangement of land masses ever since the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea eons ago. The duo also travel to Arizona, where Moores grew up pushing ore carts in his family's gold mine, and to Cyprus and Greece, where rock from the ocean floor has been tossed up to form continents. McPhee looks at the conjectural science of earthquake prediction and gives an account of a recent San Francisco quake. His leisurely excavation meanders from Mexican explorer Juan Bautista de Anza's settlement of San Francisco in 1776 to 1850s gold-mining camps to the summit of Mount Everest, made of marine limestone lifted from a shelf that once divided India and Tibet. With this volume McPhee concludes his Annals of the Former World series, which he began with Basin and Range (1980). Illustrated. (Feb.)