Publisher's Synopsis
Four audio tapes, approximate running time: 184 minutes. Twenty years ago, when john McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross-section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he travelled with. The structural arrangement of the work never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall titles Annals of the Former World. Approached, sequentially, it is an organic succession of set pieces, flashbacks, biographical sketches, and histories of the human and lithic kind; approached systematically it is a study of geological time. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology, and a masterpiece of modern non-fiction writing.
