Annals of the Former World

Annals of the Former World is a 1998 collection of nonfiction works on geology by the renowned science writer John McPhee. Presented as a geological history of America, the book collects articles written for magazines like The New Yorker, as well as the contents of four books McPhee had researched and written between 1981 and 1993: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising From the Plains, and Assembling California. It also includes a fifth book of newly published material, sorted under the chapter title, Crossing the Craton. Annals of the Former World won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1999, giving McPhee his first Pulitzer win after being nominated on three separate earlier occasions.

The first book, Basin and Range, is framed as a primer on geology, and thus it contains two large “set pieces,” as McPhee describes them, on a pair of concepts that have shaped Planet Earth from an earlier date and for a longer period of time than any other geologic forces. Those concepts are: plate tectonics and time. To communicate how time impacts the continent North Americans call home, McPhee describes the North American landscape at various periods in time, going back to the Triassic period over 250 million years ago. He focuses on studying the geological patterns found in roadcuts along Interstate 80 in California and Nevada.

In this section, McPhee also discusses at length how a Princeton English major and journalist came to devote a decades-long career to learning and writing about geology. The author takes a full-year course on geology at Princeton and finds he enjoys the topic immensely. Just as importantly, McPhee notices that there is very little popular writing about geology at the start of his career, so a big part of his obsession comes down to filling a gap in the cultural consciousness.



While Basin and Range covers California and Nevada and provides what McPhee calls a “primer” on plate tectonics, his second book, In Suspect Terrain, moves East and “attacks” this primer and some of the long-held theories surrounding how sections of the Earth’s crust shift over time. He divides the section—not so much literally but in his own mind—into four sections: a biographical feature on the contrarian plate tectonics views of geologist Anita Harris, an examination of the Delaware Water Gap fragment of the Appalachian Mountains (the idea being that if you understand a fragment of the mountain range, you can understand the whole), a discussion on how plate tectonics contributed to build the Appalachian Mountains, and a survey of Continental Glaciation, a theory that was disputed for a century but that now stands as a plausible hypothesis stating that North America was at one time covered in glaciers two miles thick - not just out West but much farther East than most scientists thought.

McPhee spends so much time on Continental Glaciation to show that theories in geology can be doubted for a century before being widely accepted. He raises this point to give credence to Anita Harris’ unorthodox views on plate tectonics. She believes that while plate tectonics is used to explain almost every major shift in terrain across North America, it’s a woefully overused theory. She instead believes it’s likely that the terrain surrounding the Appalachian Mountains may have been formed by ancient glaciers.

The third book, Rising From the Plains, moves back West to Wyoming. McPhee devotes a whole chapter to Wyoming because of its astounding geological diversity. McPhee discusses the formation of the Rocky Mountains, along with various geologic spots of interest in areas like Grand Teton and Jackson Hole. The author also introduces the reader to David Love, whose Love Ranch is located in the center of the state, which may seem like an unremarkable area to the uninitiated, but which captures in its rock strata a longer period of geologic changes to the Earth than what is represented even in the Grand Canyon (up to 2.6 billion years).



The fourth book, Assembling California, is about California of course, which McPhee says is second only to Alaska in terms of active plate tectonics. The author tells the story of California through two major geological events: The 1840s Gold Rush, which attracted a greater interest in geology than at perhaps any other time in history, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which created the first new fault line in ages across the continent.

The last book, made up of material that’s new at the time of Annals of the Former World’s release, is called Crossing the Craton. In McPhee’s words, it “describes Nebraska by visiting Colorado.” The geological phenomenon this section concerns most is America’s Midcontinental Rift which formed about 1.1 billion years ago.

Through interviews with fascinating figures and a style that brings clarity and excitement to a subject that, as McPhee himself states, is basically just about rocks, Annals of the Former World is like a detailed memoir of the planet itself.