In Suspect Terrain

Name: In Suspect Terrain
Brand: Recorded Books
Availability: InStock
Author: John McPhee
ISBN: 9781440798832

Author: John McPhee

Series: From Annals of the Former World #2

Narrator: Nelson Runger

Unabridged: 6 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 02/27/2008

Categories: Nonfiction, Science

Synopsis

From the outwash plains of Brooklyn to Indiana's drifted diamonds and gold In Suspect Terrain is a narrative of the earth, told in four sections of equal length, each in a different way reflecting the three others—a biography; a set piece about a fragment of Appalachian landscape in illuminating counterpoint to the human history there; a modern collision of ideas about the origins of the mountain range; and, in contrast, a century-old collision of ideas about the existence of the Ice Age.

The central figure is Anita Harris, an internationally celebrated geologist who went into her profession to get out of a Brooklyn ghetto. The unifying theme is plate tectonics—here concentrating on the acceptance that all aspects of the theory do not universally enjoy. As such, In Suspect Terrain is a report from the rough spots at the front edge of a science.

“This is a book you cannot put down … It provides a great deal of information about the way many geologists think about science … and about the necessity for continual questioning and revising of new and old ideas. This is the best way science can remain healthy and continue to grow.”—Robert D. Hatcher, Jr., Natural History

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 Jim on July 20, 2013

Who would think that the subject of geology could be vitally interesting? At Dartmouth College during Ordovician times, it was a dreary parade of synclines, geosynclines, and anticlines. Now it seems that the plate tectonics people has swept all that away. What John McPhee does in his book In Suspec......more

Goodreads review by Jim on March 12, 2019

Several years ago, I read John McPhee's BASIN AND RANGE, an offbeat choice for me, a book about geology and mountains and debris flows. It was so extraordinary that I read it again immediately after finishing it for the first time. McPhee's use of language, his eloquent flow and rhythm, made what in......more

Goodreads review by Martha on March 15, 2017

Suspect Terrain is as interesting for me in parts as other McPhee books were in the whole. It was interesting to be reminded of the way this country looked a gazillion years ago - something enchanting about a warm sea covering now dry land, a coral reef in Chicago. But I couldn't keep the geological......more

Goodreads review by Alan on May 29, 2017

This is basically an explication of the geography of the Appalachian Mountains, with extended side discussions of glacial theory and plate tectonics. Very illuminating for us non-geologists....although a few passages are too overloaded with technical jargon which threw me. As usual, McPhee frames his......more

Goodreads review by Wendy on November 13, 2024

I enjoyed Basin and Range so much that my reading momentum carried me right from that into (and through) this follow-on episode of Annals of the Former World, which centers on the rising and falling (times three) of the Appalachians as well as the glacial impacts of the last few ice ages on the geog......more