Lawyers in California

Assembling California

Description

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.

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.

Reviews

Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2010-06-04
Summary: "Pedantic, repetitive"

This is a geologist's book rather than a learning book. Does contain enjoyable portions regarding CA history.

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Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2010-05-30
Summary: "A flawed McPhee jewel"

Assembling California is a flawed McPhee jewel. It is about the titanic collision of tectonic plates that has - over hundreds of millions of years - pushed California up off the ocean floor and smashed it into the western United States.

Lovers of McPhee's great works such as Levels of the Game and The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield will find all the familiar treats: wonderful anecdotes and word portraits of people and places. But there are great frustrations here too. McPhee constantly refers to geological phenomena - cuttings in freeways, coloured minerals and landscapes - that require more than just dense sprays of verbiage to deepen the reader's understanding and sustain their interest.

I longed for about 20-30 pages of coloured plates, maps, aerial photos and diagrams to illustrate the concepts and places that McPhee describes. Never has the old cliché that a picture is worth 1,000 words been truer than in Assembling California. The book also needs a really good glossary of terms and a more reader-friendly diagram of the epochs of geologic time.

The result is either a lazy book (it would have taken too much effort to compile the illos) or a cheap book (it would have been much more expensive to print colour plates). McPhee sells on the quality of his words and I couldn't help feeling that the publisher traded on this fact to avoid the time and cost of making this a completely satisfying production.

The subject is intrinsically fascinating, placing the gnat-like span of Homo sapiens' existence within the vast halls of geologic time. And, as this book demonstrates, Californian geology will continue to feature in the news cycle during our lifetimes. The next time freeways fall and football pitches split down the centre in Los Angeles or San Francisco, readers of this book will understand why.

But, please, if a new edition is ever printed, make it a show-and-tell version. As it is, I couldn't recommend it to anyone without geological expertise.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-05-20
Summary: "A Geologist's Review"

This book is perhaps the best science-for-the-general-public book ever written. McPhee takes the reader on a journey through geology, through both Californian and world histories and to locations around the world while presenting information from which even a geologist can learn.

I have listened repeatedly and never tire of this recorded book. The narrator's style and voice are well suited to the subject matter but he mis-pronounces nearly every technical term - most annoying for a geologist but the general public would likely never notice.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-04-24
Summary: ""The summit of Mt Everest is marine limestone""

Geology has always seemed to me very boring in the abstract. It's only when confronting the awesome geological forces like, for instance, those that made the mountain ranges of North America does my curiosity intensify. This book probably does as good a job as any could in transporting the reader imaginatively into the field - to California especially but other parts of the globe as well - in an attempt to decipher how this very recent theory in human history, this theory of plate tectonics, works. It would have been helpful if there were included a glossary of terms, an index, and better maps and diagrams. But the writing is very descriptive with interesting insights. It tells of Eldridge Moores, a geologist at the forefront of making sense out of plate tectonics, who grew up in a mining community on an Arizona mountaintop. In the course of his life, he made the transition from a life based on the mindset of extracting whatever you can out of the earth without much concern for the consequences to one with a very careful consideration of resource utilization and sustainability.

Plate tectonics is a very recent theory in geology and the history of mankind, analogous in importance to evolution in biology and relatively in physics. From what I gather from this book, there is much yet to explain, but also much progress that has been made. In looking back over my college textbook (from the 70s), I see that it has a chapter on plate tectonics and related subjects, but this new theory had yet to be widely applied. The old, inadequate explanations of mountain-building were still in place. For example, the rise of the Sierra Nevada is still explained in terms of geosynclines. It is hard to believe now that for a long time geologists had the idea that the pressing down of sediments in the Central Valley actually caused the uplift of the Sierra.

One of the important aspects of plate tectonics is sea-floor spreading, which occurs when two plates come together on the ocean floor and new ocean crust is formed from the mantle. Ophiolites is the name applied to the rock that results. In taking a cross section of the ocean crust, the top layer is composed of horizontal sediments of ocean detritus, but then below, extending down to the mantle, are vertical or parallel layers or formations where the rock has hardened as it rose from the crust and was shoved along the ocean floor. The question, to which the theory of plate tectonics has a much better answer than anything in the past, concerns how these ophiolites wind up on the top of mountains.

One of the sub-themes of the book, which should be of some concern to at least a few who live along the San Andreas fault or other faults, is the crossing of geological time with human time. The fact that Los Angeles and San Diego are moving north along a transform fault (San Andreas Fault) and will one day be north of San Francisco and out to sea is generally realizable only in geological time. It's largely a continuous process that only amounts to a displacement of a few inches a year, but occasionally pressure will build and a significant displacement will suddenly occur. The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, which had horrifying consequences and caused much damage, is an example when geological time suddenly erupts into human time.

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Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2008-12-20
Summary: "An Introduction To Plate Tectonics"

Although California is in the title of this book, it studies plate tectonics and volcanism around the world. Although much of it does deal with California, the reader is taken to the eastern Mediterranean, Alaska and many other places where plates intersect and the moving earth shows its power.

This book gives the reader an introduction to plate tectonics, how rock emerges in the ocean and moves for ages until it submerges back into the earth. Author John McPhee explains the rocks which make up the various land masses and how they are viewed from the surface. He relates how the continents were previously aligned, and how this is reflected in rock formations and the fossil record. From the pages of this book the reader can come to understand, for example, how the marine fossils are found in the rocks of Mount Everest.

The scope of the forces covered in this book boggles the imagination. The millions of years taken to create the world we know are beyond the realm of human time. How rock can emerge from the ocean floor and, eons later, dive back under the floor is hard to comprehend, but so the world goes on.

While I found this book to be interesting, I had trouble really following the processes which are its subject. I felt that, when I finished this book, I had a better understanding of the forces which Assembled California than I did before I started, but my understanding was not greatly enhanced.