Nonfiction master McPhee (born 1931) is a legend of a certain kind of reporting. He’s written more than 35 books and countless articles for the New Yorker, Time and other prestigious publications. One of his special areas of interest is geology. He’s written several books covering aspects of geological inquiry, five of which were collected in the Pulitzer prize-winning volume ”The Annals of the Former World” in 1999. Basin and Range is the first part of that pentology.
The tone of prose of this guy is quite unique, differing from the similar ”new journalists” like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. He has a very dense style, packed with complex ideas, yet presented in digestable portions. Lots of understated humor between the lines. He has been called a pioneer of creative nonfiction, although McPhee himself prefers the term ”literature of fact”. He has been teaching a writing class of just that name at Princeton for almost 50 years. A few years ago he put together a book of essays describing his views on the craft.
This book is all about earth: stone, dirt, crag, sand and silt. Mountain ranges and tectonics. It is a deep dive into the world of geology and geologists’ theories – with a lot of surprising turns and loose ends. It’s almost too packed! McPhee brings us along on his toad trips with geology professor John Deffeyes who expounds on theories of plate movement, rare metal extraction, time periodization and more. I’ve viewed geology as a pretty dull subject, but McPhee manages to makes it fascinating. He goes back and forth in the history of geology as a discipline, and how it challenged religious views, and reminds us just how recent the epoch-changing work of dating the world really is. It reminded me of Susan Orlean’s book about the orchid expert, which is also an inside view into a field of inquiry.
An example of the prose:
“In 1841, a paleontologist had decided that the big creatures of the Mesozoic were “fearfully great lizards,” and had therefore named them dinosaurs. There were festooned crossbeds and limestone sinks, pillow lavas and petrified trees, incised meanders and defeated streams. There were dike swarms and slickensides, explosion pits, volcanic bombs. Pulsating glaciers. Hogbacks. Radiolarian ooze. There was almost enough resonance in some terms to stir the adolescent groin. The swelling up of mountains was described as an orogeny. Ontogeny, phylogeny, orogeny—accent syllable two.”
The title of the book refers to the grand basin of the United States, that reaches from Oregon through Nevada to Utah and southern California. The title of the later collection comes from a key person in the development of geology, Scotsman dr James Hutton who wrote around 1794 that reading the face of rocks is a way of accessing the ”annals of a former world”.
For anyone with a predilection for etymology, this book is a great way to learn of the hodgepodge of inconsistency that is geological terminology. There is a lot of arbitrariness in the periodization and the names of the eras. Jurassic is from a mountain range in France, le Jura. Triassic comes from findings in three places. The cambrian is named for a ancient tribe from Wales. And so on.
This book whooshed by, without me really taking the time to savor its tidbits. Writing a review is done with the intention to pin down its merits. The book bears revisiting, and I am tempted to continue delving into the vast mcpheeian oeuvre. Here’s another taste:
“As years went by, such verbal deposits would thicken. Someone developed enough effrontery to call a piece of our earth an epieugeosyncline. There were those who said interfluve when they meant between two streams, and a perfectly good word like mesopotamian would do. A cactolith, according to the American Geological Institute’s Glossary of Geology and Related Sciences, was “a quasi-horizontal chonolith composed of anastomosing ductoliths, whose distal ends curl like a harpolith, thin like a sphenolith, or bulge discordantly like an akmolith or ethmolith.” The same class of people who called one rock serpentine called another jacupirangite. Clinoptilolite, eclogite, migmatite, tincalconite, szaibelyite, pumpellyite. Meyerhofferite. The same class of people who called one rock paracelsian called another despujolsite. Metakirchheimerite, phlogopite, katzenbuckelite, mboziite, noselite, neighborite, samsonite, pigeonite, muskoxite, pabstite, aenigmatite. Joesmithite.”
Kinship of all Species 