John McPhee
is a name you will see here again. He is, without doubt, one of my favorite
writers. Some of his books are collections of articles he wrote for The New
Yorker, others address a single subject.
No matter
the subject, if McPhee writes it I will read it.
Witness the
fact that I have read his books (and many others) on raising oranges, building
birch-bark canoes, Bill Bradley, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the Swiss Army, cargo
ships, and the geology of North America—subjects I have no particular interest
in but enjoyed immensely reading about.
Among my
favorite McPhee books is Rising from the
Plains, one of five volumes that make up his Pulitzer Prize-winning
compilation, Annals of the Former World.
The book is
about the geology of Wyoming, as seen through McPhee’s travels with geologist
David Love. You’ll find that reading about rocks can be fascinating. But Love is also a Wyoming boy who grew up on
an isolated ranch when the West was still wild, and those stories are just as
engaging as the tales about traces of the Triassic on the landscape.
This is about high-country geology and a
Rocky Mountain regional geologist. I raise that semaphore here at the start so
no one will feel misled by an opening passage in which a slim young woman who
is not in any sense a geologist steps down from a train in Rawlins, Wyoming, in
order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old
West.
So begins Rising
from the Plains by John McPhee. How can you not read on?
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