Will I love Annals of the Former World?

Geology can be a tough sell for the popular science audience. It can seem boringly commonplace yet remote in relevance to our day-to-day lives. But it is probably the most important science for understanding how and where we live.

In this beautifully written compilation, McPhee drives across North America, generally in the company of a local geologist, exploring the deep past and our modern relationship with it through roadcuts, quarries, eroded exposures, volcanoes, and mountains pushing up through the sediments.

McPhee is a New Yorker writer, with all that implies–his work is meticulously written, detailed, and literary. This book is… show more.

Every geology book collection should include this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic. McPhee travels with four different U.S. geologists, visiting their outcrops and laboratories while tracing the evolution of geologic thought and discoveries. McPhee has the eye of a scientist, the soul of a poet, and the pen (keyboard?) of a master author. The result is fluid and beautiful writing about science and those who practice it. 

New Yorker writer John McPhee captures the romance and drama of geology like no other writer. His Annals, written over two decades as he traveled the breadth of North America in the company of articulate, passionate geologists, is unique in the literature of science. OK, I admit that this is a bit of a cheat, as Annals collates 4 of McPhee’s earlier books, titles from 1981 to 1993, into a single massive tome. But what mastery! Savor every page.