Annals of the Former World
by John McPhee
Summary
John McPhee spent close to twenty years driving Interstate 80 back and forth across the United States with a rotating cast of geologists, using the highway's road cuts, the exposed rock revealed wherever the interstate had been blasted or dug through a hill, as a cross section of the entire continent's geological history. The book collects four previously published volumes into one continuous account, Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains and Assembling California each first appeared on their own across the 1980s and early 1990s, and McPhee wrote a fifth section, Crossing the Craton, specifically to complete the collected edition.
Each section follows McPhee traveling with a different geologist, learning to read a different stretch of the country's underlying structure, from the ancient, stable rock of the continent's core to the young, still colliding terrain of California, built from pieces of ocean floor and island chains that arrived from elsewhere over hundreds of millions of years. McPhee translates technical geology into narrative without simplifying the science away, letting the specific personalities and working habits of his geologist guides carry a reader through material that could otherwise read as a specialist textbook.
At nearly seven hundred pages, the collected volume is a serious commitment, but McPhee's prose moves at the pace of a long, engaged conversation rather than a lecture, and it suits a reader with genuine curiosity about how the ground underfoot actually came to be the way it is. It rewards patience with real narrative pleasure rather than technical exposition alone.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave McPhee the 1999 award for general nonfiction for the collected edition Farrar, Straus and Giroux published in 1998, decades after McPhee had begun the individual books that make it up. That year's other finalists were Elliott Currie's Crime and Punishment in America and Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do.
The prize came late in a career built largely on shorter pieces for The New Yorker, and Annals of the Former World gathers roughly two decades of reporting trips into the longest book of McPhee's career, at 696 pages in the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition. McPhee, who has taught nonfiction writing at Princeton since 1975, was already in his late sixties when the collected edition appeared, and three of the four books folded into it, Basin and Range, Rising from the Plains and Assembling California, had themselves been Pulitzer finalists before the collected edition won.