Basin and Range, John McPhee
Basin and Range, John McPhee
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Basin and Range

Author: John McPhee

Narrator: Nelson Runger

Unabridged: 7 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/03/2004

Categories: Nonfiction, Nature


Synopsis

The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world—a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting fora lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.

“In Basin and Range, McPhee is not so much a visiting amateur as a rhapsodist of 'deep time' … The result is a fascinating book.”—Paul Zweig, The New York Times Book Review

Includes an interview with the author

About John McPhee

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, and in the years since, he has written over thirty books, including Oranges, Coming into the Country, The Control of Nature, The Founding Fish, Uncommon Carriers, and Silk Parachute. Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Margie

This would be two-and-half stars, if that were an option. I very much wanted to love this book. It's been recommended to me multiple times by multiple people, even long before I started working with geologists, long before I held oolites in my hand, or saw an angular unconformity, or got to know Wa......more