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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"every a hundred years in honor of air two men formed the long argument over gravity" By erasing John McPhee's New Yorker article "Assembling California," @jinxshoe excavates the history of the Chinese in California. https://t.co/Sl34X2MEzJ
previously: @Kickstarter @ObamaWhiteHouse currently: certified naturalist, pro composter, @urbandictionary, @Integrity_Inst, board member @basilicahudson
John McPhee is the Spielberg of nature writing, in that he has this knack for making everything *wondrous* in this specific, highly comprehensible way. Sacrilege to say? Idk! Im running off to gaze at some exposed fault lines nearby, my copy of “Assembling California” in hand.
Early modernist. Author of IF WE WERE VILLAINS. "At once charming and insufferable" per the NYTBR. Rep @ariellemarla. She/her.
@frumpenberg John McPhee makes a landscape feel completely alive (and his description of the '89 SF earthquake in Assembling California is genuinely riveting)