Assembling California (signed)

McPhee, John

ISBN 10: 0374106452 / ISBN 13: 9780374106454

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1993

Signed on the half-title page by McPhee. The fourth book in his geological transect across the United States, eventually all of them repackaged and refined asAnnals of the Former World which won the Pulitzer Prize. This book, which travels from the Sierra to the coast,finishes with an amazing sustained description of the San Andreas fault and the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.A near fine copy with a few incidentally dogeared pages and a brief, inconspicuous gift inscription on the front free endpaper that outlines the geologic time periods: "John, Enjoy!! Dale." In a fine jacket. Seller Inventory # 991

Synopsis:

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.

Review: As an explainer, John McPhee is a national treasure. The longtime "New Yorker" staff writer has taken us inside the world of art museums, environmental groups, fruit markets, airship factories, basketball courts, and atomic-bomb labs the world over. Here he covers the complex geological history of California, the source of much news today. As Californians daily await the inevitable great earthquake that will send their cities tumbling down like so many matchsticks, McPhee piles fact on luminous fact, wrestling raw data into a beautifully written narrative that gainsays a sedimentologist's warning: "You can't cope with this in an organized way," he told McPhee, "because the rocks aren't organized." As always, McPhee enlarges our understanding of the strange, making it familiar--and endlessly interesting.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Assembling California (signed)
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY
Publication Date: 1993
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Near fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: First edition.