In Suspect Terrain
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st pr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Beneath the familiar landscapes of the American Northeast lies a geological story of staggering complexity and deep time — one that John McPhee's In Suspect Terrain brings to vivid, authoritative life. Travelling the length of Interstate 80 through the Appalachians and beyond, McPhee guides the reader through hundreds of millions of years of upheaval, erosion, and continental drift, using the highway as a transect through Earth's own autobiography. At the heart of the narrative is Anita Harris, a maverick USGS geologist whose fiercely independent views on plate tectonics challenge the orthodoxy of her peers, giving the book its animating intellectual tension. The second volume in McPhee's celebrated Annals of the Former World series, In Suspect Terrain exemplifies his singular gift for rendering abstruse science into luminous, richly textured prose. His style is patient and precise, yet shot through with a dry wit and an almost novelistic eye for character, ensuring that even the most technical passages crackle with human drama. McPhee argues, with quiet insistence, that the ground beneath our feet is never truly stable — and by the final page, the reader will never look at a roadside rock-cut, a river valley, or a mountain ridge in quite the same way again.
Author: John Mcphee
Format: Hardback
Published: 1983, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Genre: Geography & Earth science
Edition: 1st pr.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Very good
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Beneath the familiar landscapes of the American Northeast lies a geological story of staggering complexity and deep time — one that John McPhee's In Suspect Terrain brings to vivid, authoritative life. Travelling the length of Interstate 80 through the Appalachians and beyond, McPhee guides the reader through hundreds of millions of years of upheaval, erosion, and continental drift, using the highway as a transect through Earth's own autobiography. At the heart of the narrative is Anita Harris, a maverick USGS geologist whose fiercely independent views on plate tectonics challenge the orthodoxy of her peers, giving the book its animating intellectual tension. The second volume in McPhee's celebrated Annals of the Former World series, In Suspect Terrain exemplifies his singular gift for rendering abstruse science into luminous, richly textured prose. His style is patient and precise, yet shot through with a dry wit and an almost novelistic eye for character, ensuring that even the most technical passages crackle with human drama. McPhee argues, with quiet insistence, that the ground beneath our feet is never truly stable — and by the final page, the reader will never look at a roadside rock-cut, a river valley, or a mountain ridge in quite the same way again.