John McPhee的書也值得注意：補充 - 地球科學討論

對John McPhee的補充說明：
下列是Amazon.com的編輯對他的介紹

In 1978 New Yorker magazine staff writer John McPhee set out
making notes for an ambitious project: a geological history
of North America, centered, for the sake of convenience, on
the 40th parallel, a history that encompasses billions of years.
In 1981 he published the first of the four books that would come
from his research: Basin and Range, a study of the mountainous
lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevadas. Two years later
came In Suspect Terrain, a grand overview of the Appalachian mountain
system. In 1986 McPhee released Rising from the Plains, a history of
the Rocky Mountains set largely in Wyoming. And in 1993 came Assembling
California, a survey of the area geologists find to be a laboratory of
volcanic and tectonic processes, a place where geology can be watched
in the making. Annals of the Former World gathers these four volumes,
which McPhee always conceived of as a whole, to make that epic of the
Earth's formation; to it he adds a fifth book, Crossing the Craton,
which introduces the continent's ancient core, underlying what is now
Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.

McPhee's great virtue as a journalist covering the sciences--and any
other of the countless subjects he has taken on, for that matter--is
his ability to distill and explain complex matters: here, for example,
the processes of mineral deposition or of plate tectonics. He does so
by allowing geologists to speak for themselves and an entertaining lot
they are, those sometimes odd men and women who puzzle out the landscape
for clues to its most ancient past. Annals of the Former World is a
magisterial work of popular science for which geologists--and devotees
of good writing--will be grateful. --Gregory McNamee



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你我解讀地質的趣味，可是連文學家都著迷的呢'


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