• Assembling California

  • By: John McPhee
  • Narrated by: Nelson Runger
  • Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (238 ratings)

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Assembling California  By  cover art

Assembling California

By: John McPhee
Narrated by: Nelson Runger
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Publisher's summary

At various times in a span of 15 years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults.

The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect — in the gold disruptions of the 19th century no less than in the earthquakes of the 20th — and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California.

McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to listen to, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.

©1993 John McPhee (P)1993 Recorded Books, LLC

What listeners say about Assembling California

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Subduction leads to orogeny zones in California

This year I've been reading the separate segments of McPhee's Pulitzer Prize winning 1998 opus Annals of the Former World, but skipped (for now) Rising from the Plains because I was going to be driving with my brother from San Francisco to Mesa, AZ. We were going to hang in Berkeley and hit Yosemite, Sequoia, etc., on our trip South and East and I figured it was a perfect time to read 'Assembling California'.

Like all McPhee writing, 'Assembling California 'is an amazing conglomeration of good writing, great characters, and interesting technical facts. However, unlike the earlier books in this series ( Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain) it just doesn't set up as nicely. I'm not sure if it had more to do with the messiness of California's geology, the limits of Eldridge Moores as an engaging character, or if McPhee had just grown a bit tired of his own Great I-80 Geology Project. He is engaging, but there just wasn't as much sparkle or heat as with earlier books with Karen Kleinspehn, Kenneth Deffeyes, or Anita Harris. A solid McPhee and a good addition to the series, just not the strongest piece. I hope that 'Rising from the Plains' works out a bit better.

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22 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Great Idea, Great Prose, Difficult Listen

I love the way McPhee writes: who else would describe a beard as "tetragrammatonic"? But for me picking up on those kinds of literary allusions is a lot easier than trying to understand geology, and this book sometimes seems just too delighted in the swirl of geologic terms to make sense of. Since listening to this, I've looked at a paper copy, and that made it easier to keep the story sorted in my mind, but I have never studied geology, and while listening I found I was often rewinding and relistening and sometimes still not understanding what was going on.

At the same time, I really enjoyed this book. The narration is pleasant. And the organizing ideas of the book work really well. McPhee organizes the book around a series of roadtrips in California, and brings up geological topics as they relate to places you can visit, especially if you live in the Bay Area or the Central Valley. The thing I like best about this book is how most of the geological information arises out of dialogues with the pioneering geologist Eldridge Moores. Moores makes a great character to organize the story around.

Bottom line: as a piece of writing this is great. As a way to learn about geology, it's hard.

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

California as a lens to the surface of Earth

McPhee's focus is the formation of California, but the scope of Assembling California is nothing less than the formation of all the continents, islands and oceans as understood by modern geology.

Just as quantum mechanics and relativity transformed Physics, just as the concept of brain plasticity transformed Neuroscience, just so the theory of plate tectonics transformed Geology. John McPhee explains the transformation of the science, and the transformation of the Earth's surface in fine prose. He quotes dialogs with geologists--mainly Eldridge Moores--gives analogies, and uses anecdotes drawn from personal experience to convey the concepts.

Assembling California works fine on the printed page, but has a few too many technical terms to work entirely well as an audio book.

Nevertheless, this is a well-written and well-read book that conveys the outline of modern tectonic geology to the layman.

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8 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Enjoyable but Disojinted

If you've read the the rest of the Annals of the Former World, you will no doubt get this book. I enjoyed it, but the mix of history and geology in this one is a lot clumsier than it is in the other books. The book is most similar to Rising from the Plains, in that it seems to contain more anecdotal history than geology. The difference is that McPhee doesn't fuse the anecdotes and the science seamlessly like he does in most of the other installments. If you're new to the series, I'd recommend starting with Basin and Range.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

McPhee and Runger

The missing piece of the Annals of the Former World series finally appears on Audible. I can???t recommend this series highly enough.

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5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Atypically boring

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

No - I love John McPhee, but he really fell down with this book. It starts out with kind of a scattershot history of California, both geographic and human. Then it devolves quickly into a dry, technical description of seabed geology.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Lush and informative.

McPhee's sensitive interweaving of science, nature, and humanity is as compelling here as it always is.

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2 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Mispronunciations Drove Me Nuts

A terrific narrative completely spoiled by easily-avoided mispronunciations by the reader. A sound editor should have caught these. I was grinding my teeth together and had to bail by Chapter 10. What a shame.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Enjoyed What I Was Able to Assemble

I was able to mentally assemble the related human stories, but his coverage of geological features did not have the reader's mental imagery in mind, and as a result, the reader will not be able to mentally visualize them - the geological terms will fly by unconstructed.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

geography jargon

Would you try another book from John McPhee and/or Nelson Runger?

yes

Would you recommend Assembling California to your friends? Why or why not?

not sure, there is a lot of geography terms used that I did not understand so I got bored. I have enjoyed other books by John McPhee more.

Would you listen to another book narrated by Nelson Runger?

sure

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