A REVIEW OF

Rising From The Plains
by John McPhee, Collins, 1987

     Anyone for a rousing good read about geology? Looking for a real page-turner about epicratonic seas and pyroclastic debris?
     John McPhee, veteran contributor to The New Yorker and author of 19 books, has made it his business to make geology interesting to non-scientists. Rising From The Plains tells the story of the rise and fall and rise again of the Rocky Mountains over the last two billions years or so.
     McPhee lures unwary readers into this daunting enterprise by regaling us with tales of a remarkable frontier family. David Love, the "grand old man of Rocky Mountain geology," grew up on an isolated Wyoming ranch in the first half of this century, with lots of time to wonder why rock formations lay this way or that. After getting a PhD from Yale and working for oil companies for a few years, he spent the rest of his life doing field work in his native state, in a landscape that exposes more of the earth's history to an inquisitive eye than perhaps any other locale on the planet.
     McPhee's writing is breezy, often conversational. He tosses around geologist's jargon with little or no explanation, but a scientifically illiterate reader with a little patience need not look up each word to follow the argument. McPhee is aware that such discourse might quickly exhaust the attention span of his audience, so he weaves in delightful anecdotes of frontier life, tales of desperadoes visiting the Love ranch, rattlesnake stew served to unwitting guests and pupils from a vast area thawing out their inkwells in a tiny one-room school before they start their morning lessons.
     By the end of his finely crafted story, McPhee has gone through a course in both the history of the earth and the history of a science. He elucidates the differences between laboratory geologists and field geologists, and how geologists' interests often reflect the area they grew up in. He talks of plate tectonics, a theory that explains how the continents have separated and slithered around the glove to their present positions, but which leaves many questions about the origins of the Rockies unanswered. He lectures about coal formations and petroleum deposits, how they are formed, how they are discovered, and what intensive exploitation is doing to the landscape and the lives of its inhabitants.
     Rising From The Plains is McPhee's third published book on geology, part of a series called Annals Of The Former World. If you have time to read just one book on geology this year, it better not be this one; McPhee's seductive prose might have you coming back for more.

Originally published in the Globe & Mail (Toronto), May 2, 1987