Assembling California
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.
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What Hacker News says
- I own every book McPhee published and have read each one at least twice. He is, without question, the finest writer of non-fiction I know. Annals, as you may know, was originally published as 4 separate volumes, each covering a particular US region. Assembling California is my absolute favorite McPhee work. I have a layman’s interest in geology and plate tectonics that I developed specifically because of this book.
- John McPhee's wonderful and Pulitzer-winning non-fiction natural history The Annals of the Former World about geology—specifically North American geology as exposed in highway road cuts!
This title which was collects a series of books originally published in series and only collected in a single volume subsequently,
happened to have been written over the years during which plate tectonic theory was still being fiercely debated, indeed some of the characters contested it.
By that happy accident the book is thus simultaneously several things:
- a marvelous natural history of the United States revealed through characteristically engaging and evocative personal narratives
- a look at North American geology which over the course of the books collected is increasingly revealed
- a very effective communication of what geological _deep time_ really means, and
- a fascinating look into the inner workings of scientific inquiry and discourse: messy, passionate, exquisite, invaluable
Of particular local interest is the must-read Assembling California, the final book collected, which contains a duly famous second by second account of how the Loma Prieta earthquake went down.
A nice introduction:
https://californiacurated.com/2024/09/06/looking-back-john-m...
- This is rad! I recently read Assembling California by John McPhee[1][2] - highly recommended BTW.
Anyway, I was musing that I'd love to see a 3D globe with a time slider that I could play around with and visualize the (projected of course) movement of the plates to get us to where we are now.
Do you know of anything like that?
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19898.Assembling_Califor...
[2] excerpt: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/09/07/assembling-cal...
- Perfect timing - I just finished John McPhee’s wonderful “Assembling California”. It goes into quite a bit of detail of how California came together, and includes some history of tectonic plate theory, the gold rush, and quite a lot more.
- John McPhee is an amazing writer. These articles eventually became his book, Assembling California, which in 1998 was republished as part of a collection of his books on geology entitled Annals of the Former World.
- I've only read "Assembling California", but I agree. I'll add, though, the dry-ness is offset with a bit of wit. A deadpan humor, almost.
I enjoyed it and I'm sure I'll make my way through some more of his works.
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