---
product_id: 7112147
title: "Annals of the Former World"
price: "S$39"
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reviews_count: 8
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region: Singapore
---

# Annals of the Former World

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Annals of the Former World [McPhee, John] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Annals of the Former World

Review: Deep Time - Take a field trip through North America's Basin and Range province, stretching East to West from Utah to California and South to North from Mexico to Oregon, and you're in a land being pulled apart by Tectonic Forces to someday becoming an arm jutting out from North America into the Pacific Ocean. Baja and California will become first a very long peninsula then later a archipelago west of the continent. Our world is indeed changing all around us. If you really love reading about Geology and Geography then John McPhee's Pulitzer Prize winning 1998 book "Annals of the Former World" may be just what you're looking for. It's actually like reading 5 shorter books on different aspects of geology: regional landscapes, exotic features, exploring the craton and even California*. But no matter what your interest are, if you tackle this monumental work of over 700 pages be prepared for lots of technical terminology in the Earth Sciences and Geography along with some interesting bits of cultural-history, biographies of various geologist and what frontier life was like in the various regions covered. Some readers may not like McPhee's frequent philosophical or biographical passages, that can be quite long and cover a lot of ground, but his inner thoughts just reflect his passion for geology and all the related sciences'. For me this was a long, tough but rewarding read. Some portions of the book flowed along smoothly while others left me feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the author's lengthy and technical writing style, so unless you're up for a very challenging read you might want to look elsewhere. But I, for one, found this to be an enjoyable book that took me to remote location around North America, the Globe, and back into Earth's Deep Time exploring the origins of our landscape, where it came from and where it's going. McPhee's writing is very descriptive, giving you a clear picture of the places he, and his geologist friends, were traveling through. There aren't many illustrations in the Kindle edition; a few photos, some charts and maps, so my iPad got a real workout as I looked up various mountain ranges and other geological regions. But it became clear to me that if I were to take a motor trip through the western United States I would want to have a friendly geologist with me just to help me understand what we were looking at. All features on the Earth have a long history and it helps to have some idea of their origins and the events that led to their present condition. In this book you'll learn about sea mounts and hot-spots, plate tectonics and continental drift, how mountains grow and erode away, how seas come and go and how long all this has been going on. Be sure to read the author’s Afterword: “A Narrative Table of Contents”, it will explain a lot of questions you may have. In my case I read it after but it would also make a good introduction to the author and book. The science in this book was cutting-edge in 1998 but things are always changing and new theories can spring up almost overnight. Over the past decade new observations have lead to new ideas and new ways of looking at the land and its history. But things in geology change at a very slow pace, so whatever “dated” material there may be in the text shouldn’t make any difference to the general reader. If you're interested in learning the history of land formations, diamonds, glacial till or just plain old rocks, than "Annals of the Former World" is a good bet! I had no technical or downloading problems with this Kindle edition. *As far as I can tell the text was also published as 4 or 5 different books, one for each chapter. Last Ranger
Review: Surprising, Deep, and Fascinating. - I most enjoyed "Basin and Range" in this tetralogy of geological nonfiction, as that is also the physiography of the land where I live. John McPhee is your best guide and storyteller of our immense, vast, and deep continental history. I cannot properly review the work in a short space, but let me disclose a rather astounding little surprise of the book: While traveling through the Nevada desert at night, McPhee and his companion (a geological expert) witness a large hovering vessel--a vehicle looking very alien and extraterrestrial--fly and propel itself in the most unusual and technologically unique way (but too advanced and luminescent to be military, especially 35 years ago). The next morning the local paper had comments from a number of locals who also reported seeing it. The incident is described in less than a page, only a short aside in the progressive, westward description of the continent, numbering hundreds of pages on an otherwise unrelated subject (or is it?). But by this point, McPhee has already established his credibility with conscientious articulations about his subjects, as well as restrained and informed expressions of the Earth, so that this aside cannot be dismissed so easily. For me, it caused a tumbler to fall in my brain, which seems to have had cascading effects, to the point that I have re-assessed possibilities for such phenomena on Earth. Which ironically brings me full circle to McPhee's subject. If I accept McPhee's account (and I think I just might) it is impossible to not think of the time it must take to travel to Earth from distant origins. Even with incomprehensible technology, the time in travelling must have been immense. And the conclusion emerging from both McPhee's written descriptions, and the cracks in the rocks themselves, is the breath-taking sense of deep time. (Could it be that if visits have occurred, they were only by artificial life forms that can physically endure thousands or even millions of years? Would they have been created by organic life forms? Did they rule over them? But I digress.) The point is that reading McPhee's book and the study of geology give me the sense of how recently we have come along. How even the oldest of the rocks we see, the Precambrian gneiss or schist, could well have come a billion years after other rock planets had been left by those who sought to gather and collect rocks on other planets. If you visit the Grand Canyon you get to see rocks that go back almost half of the 4.5 billion years that span the age of our world. These are the real documents of our Earth's history. And maybe even reflections of eras that coincide with glorious ages of exploration by others in our universe. Maybe that brief blip about a possible alien encounter, in the middle of a lengthy and conscientiously-described account of the geological history of our land, is not so out of place.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #38,577 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #5 in Geology (Books) #25 in Travel Writing Reference #212 in U.S. State & Local History |
| Customer Reviews | 4.7 out of 5 stars 856 Reviews |

## Images

![Annals of the Former World - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Sv6F02STL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Deep Time
*by L***R on November 12, 2018*

Take a field trip through North America's Basin and Range province, stretching East to West from Utah to California and South to North from Mexico to Oregon, and you're in a land being pulled apart by Tectonic Forces to someday becoming an arm jutting out from North America into the Pacific Ocean. Baja and California will become first a very long peninsula then later a archipelago west of the continent. Our world is indeed changing all around us. If you really love reading about Geology and Geography then John McPhee's Pulitzer Prize winning 1998 book "Annals of the Former World" may be just what you're looking for. It's actually like reading 5 shorter books on different aspects of geology: regional landscapes, exotic features, exploring the craton and even California*. But no matter what your interest are, if you tackle this monumental work of over 700 pages be prepared for lots of technical terminology in the Earth Sciences and Geography along with some interesting bits of cultural-history, biographies of various geologist and what frontier life was like in the various regions covered. Some readers may not like McPhee's frequent philosophical or biographical passages, that can be quite long and cover a lot of ground, but his inner thoughts just reflect his passion for geology and all the related sciences'. For me this was a long, tough but rewarding read. Some portions of the book flowed along smoothly while others left me feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the author's lengthy and technical writing style, so unless you're up for a very challenging read you might want to look elsewhere. But I, for one, found this to be an enjoyable book that took me to remote location around North America, the Globe, and back into Earth's Deep Time exploring the origins of our landscape, where it came from and where it's going. McPhee's writing is very descriptive, giving you a clear picture of the places he, and his geologist friends, were traveling through. There aren't many illustrations in the Kindle edition; a few photos, some charts and maps, so my iPad got a real workout as I looked up various mountain ranges and other geological regions. But it became clear to me that if I were to take a motor trip through the western United States I would want to have a friendly geologist with me just to help me understand what we were looking at. All features on the Earth have a long history and it helps to have some idea of their origins and the events that led to their present condition. In this book you'll learn about sea mounts and hot-spots, plate tectonics and continental drift, how mountains grow and erode away, how seas come and go and how long all this has been going on. Be sure to read the author’s Afterword: “A Narrative Table of Contents”, it will explain a lot of questions you may have. In my case I read it after but it would also make a good introduction to the author and book. The science in this book was cutting-edge in 1998 but things are always changing and new theories can spring up almost overnight. Over the past decade new observations have lead to new ideas and new ways of looking at the land and its history. But things in geology change at a very slow pace, so whatever “dated” material there may be in the text shouldn’t make any difference to the general reader. If you're interested in learning the history of land formations, diamonds, glacial till or just plain old rocks, than "Annals of the Former World" is a good bet! I had no technical or downloading problems with this Kindle edition. *As far as I can tell the text was also published as 4 or 5 different books, one for each chapter. Last Ranger

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Surprising, Deep, and Fascinating.
*by J***T on September 4, 2015*

I most enjoyed "Basin and Range" in this tetralogy of geological nonfiction, as that is also the physiography of the land where I live. John McPhee is your best guide and storyteller of our immense, vast, and deep continental history. I cannot properly review the work in a short space, but let me disclose a rather astounding little surprise of the book: While traveling through the Nevada desert at night, McPhee and his companion (a geological expert) witness a large hovering vessel--a vehicle looking very alien and extraterrestrial--fly and propel itself in the most unusual and technologically unique way (but too advanced and luminescent to be military, especially 35 years ago). The next morning the local paper had comments from a number of locals who also reported seeing it. The incident is described in less than a page, only a short aside in the progressive, westward description of the continent, numbering hundreds of pages on an otherwise unrelated subject (or is it?). But by this point, McPhee has already established his credibility with conscientious articulations about his subjects, as well as restrained and informed expressions of the Earth, so that this aside cannot be dismissed so easily. For me, it caused a tumbler to fall in my brain, which seems to have had cascading effects, to the point that I have re-assessed possibilities for such phenomena on Earth. Which ironically brings me full circle to McPhee's subject. If I accept McPhee's account (and I think I just might) it is impossible to not think of the time it must take to travel to Earth from distant origins. Even with incomprehensible technology, the time in travelling must have been immense. And the conclusion emerging from both McPhee's written descriptions, and the cracks in the rocks themselves, is the breath-taking sense of deep time. (Could it be that if visits have occurred, they were only by artificial life forms that can physically endure thousands or even millions of years? Would they have been created by organic life forms? Did they rule over them? But I digress.) The point is that reading McPhee's book and the study of geology give me the sense of how recently we have come along. How even the oldest of the rocks we see, the Precambrian gneiss or schist, could well have come a billion years after other rock planets had been left by those who sought to gather and collect rocks on other planets. If you visit the Grand Canyon you get to see rocks that go back almost half of the 4.5 billion years that span the age of our world. These are the real documents of our Earth's history. And maybe even reflections of eras that coincide with glorious ages of exploration by others in our universe. Maybe that brief blip about a possible alien encounter, in the middle of a lengthy and conscientiously-described account of the geological history of our land, is not so out of place.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A tour de force amongst science books for the layman
*by R***D on March 9, 2023*

Yes it was penned for the layman but make no mistake, Annals of the Former World is a comprehensive treatise on North American geology containing enough hard science to surely please even an academic in the field. Writing in a wonderfully disarming anecdotal style, McPhee primarily covers the geology of several parts of the U.S. but also addresses other parts of the world including Europe, southeast Asia, and South America. Also included are mini-biographies of several prominent geologists and other historical figures wrapped in together with the geology material. Although three of the five volumes of this compilation were originally published in the 1980s, I found in doing a bit of web browsing while reading this book that our understanding of the Earth’s plates and their movements over the last few hundred million years hasn’t fundamentally changed since then. Going back further in geologic time, the vision in Annals becomes considerably murkier with the exception perhaps of the coverage of the ancient core of the North American continent in Book 5 (Crossing the Craton). It’s likely that research and field work over the last twenty years has shed more light on the time period of say 250 to 1000 million years ago (mya). It’s possible that we may never have a clear idea of what the Earth’s land masses really looked like before ~1000 mya, due to the unknowns of what became of land that dove into the mantle at subduction zones at so many plate boundaries and so many times over many hundreds of millions of years. In addition, the lack of skeletal vertebrate life before around 400 mya makes the fossil record much spottier before then and hence, the older layers of rock around the world much more difficult to reliably index to each other in time. Annals is easily one of the best books I’ve read. I’m not surprised at all that it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 in the General Nonfiction category. Over 650 pages but I wish it had been longer!

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