Finished Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains late last week. It must have originated as an offshoot of Mountains Beyond Mountains, because he met the protagonist of the book through Partners in Health. At any rate, it is a treat to read, a harrowing but uplifting story told extremely well. Tracy Kidder is a pretty gifted journalist. But it's not deep or revealing, really. There are none of the "holy shit I never thought about it that way before" moments that McPhee manages to hit you with every three pages.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
annals of the former world
I'm going to try something new this year. Instead of just reading books and then moving on to the next once I'm done, I'm going to write a little bit of a reaction to each one. I hope that will help me get more out of them, especially the deeper and more complicated ones (The Myth of Sisyphus is near the top of my pile right now...hoo boy).
Anyway, I just finished John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning geological history of the United States, Annals of the Former World. He's a fluid writer with a near-perfect eye for the revealing anecdote or observation or metaphor. One from Annals that has stuck with me is his analogy of the history of Earth to a human wingspan. If you stretch your arms out to the sides and imagine the distance between your fingertips as the lifespan of Earth, you could wipe out human history with a single swipe from a medium-grade nail file. I got on a bit of a perspective kick last year, which Appointment in Samarra played into in a different way, and Job, and to which my every-few-monthly re-reading of "A Tranquil Star" contributes. It's humbling and challenging to be reminded of how pitifully small we are. We are conscious geologic agents, in a way that no other living creatures have ever been. But our contribution to geology is comparatively tiny -- a few million tons of sediment displaced from California mountains into a valley, a few holes dug partway into the crust -- and the consequences of our contributions will live on, as McPhee puts it, essentially forever on the human time scale.
Another great strength of the book, to me, is McPhee's ability to seamlessly weave a story about a single interesting person into a much broader narrative, best exemplified in Annals in the section on Wyoming and the geologist David Love. This is a technique I really enjoy as a reader and McPhee is a master of it.
When he's explaining the scale of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California, he first describes the event clinically -- such-and-such happened at such-and-such a depth, causing such-and-such consequences in the rock -- but then eschews metaphor for the most part. Instead he gives a stream of short anecdotes, a few sentences each, describing how the quake affected individual people. The chief engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, who was ON THE BRIDGE when the quake hit San Francisco. The woman living in the Marina neighborhood, whose fourth floor apartment ended up on the ground floor after the three stories below collapsed straight down. And all of that in the context of the fact that Loma Prieta was not an especially huge quake, that it was just one in a series of thousands upon thousands of quakes that are moving the Pacific Plate up toward Alaska while it pushed into the North American plate. In fact, one of the themes of the book is that geology is something that generally doesn't happen smoothly or gradually but in bursts. The creation of river canyons, for example, occurs mainly as a result of many huge floods, not of the daily trickle or rush of water.
Getting back to Loma Prieta, McPhee's love of anecdote is also one of the two main drawbacks of the book for me. Simply put, he sometimes needs an editor whose pen has a little more red ink in it. I also read The Curve of Binding Energy last year, and it had the same problem: After a while (like, three pages), those anecdotes start to lose their force and just get repetitive and irritating. Maybe that's why some of his essays are so nearly perfect: Their length just forced him to pare things down. "Irons in the Fire" comes to mind. The other main drawback was perhaps more indicative of my own ignorance of geology, but sometimes McPhee's descriptions of mechanisms or of the way things look now just didn't quite quite conjure up the images or understanding that I'd hoped for. Often, I found myself wishing for a quick illustration, but these were unfortunately few and far between. The maps and drawings, where they exist in the book, were excellent.
All in all, a book I'm very glad to have read.
Anyway, I just finished John McPhee's Pulitzer-winning geological history of the United States, Annals of the Former World. He's a fluid writer with a near-perfect eye for the revealing anecdote or observation or metaphor. One from Annals that has stuck with me is his analogy of the history of Earth to a human wingspan. If you stretch your arms out to the sides and imagine the distance between your fingertips as the lifespan of Earth, you could wipe out human history with a single swipe from a medium-grade nail file. I got on a bit of a perspective kick last year, which Appointment in Samarra played into in a different way, and Job, and to which my every-few-monthly re-reading of "A Tranquil Star" contributes. It's humbling and challenging to be reminded of how pitifully small we are. We are conscious geologic agents, in a way that no other living creatures have ever been. But our contribution to geology is comparatively tiny -- a few million tons of sediment displaced from California mountains into a valley, a few holes dug partway into the crust -- and the consequences of our contributions will live on, as McPhee puts it, essentially forever on the human time scale.
Another great strength of the book, to me, is McPhee's ability to seamlessly weave a story about a single interesting person into a much broader narrative, best exemplified in Annals in the section on Wyoming and the geologist David Love. This is a technique I really enjoy as a reader and McPhee is a master of it.
When he's explaining the scale of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in California, he first describes the event clinically -- such-and-such happened at such-and-such a depth, causing such-and-such consequences in the rock -- but then eschews metaphor for the most part. Instead he gives a stream of short anecdotes, a few sentences each, describing how the quake affected individual people. The chief engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, who was ON THE BRIDGE when the quake hit San Francisco. The woman living in the Marina neighborhood, whose fourth floor apartment ended up on the ground floor after the three stories below collapsed straight down. And all of that in the context of the fact that Loma Prieta was not an especially huge quake, that it was just one in a series of thousands upon thousands of quakes that are moving the Pacific Plate up toward Alaska while it pushed into the North American plate. In fact, one of the themes of the book is that geology is something that generally doesn't happen smoothly or gradually but in bursts. The creation of river canyons, for example, occurs mainly as a result of many huge floods, not of the daily trickle or rush of water.
Getting back to Loma Prieta, McPhee's love of anecdote is also one of the two main drawbacks of the book for me. Simply put, he sometimes needs an editor whose pen has a little more red ink in it. I also read The Curve of Binding Energy last year, and it had the same problem: After a while (like, three pages), those anecdotes start to lose their force and just get repetitive and irritating. Maybe that's why some of his essays are so nearly perfect: Their length just forced him to pare things down. "Irons in the Fire" comes to mind. The other main drawback was perhaps more indicative of my own ignorance of geology, but sometimes McPhee's descriptions of mechanisms or of the way things look now just didn't quite quite conjure up the images or understanding that I'd hoped for. Often, I found myself wishing for a quick illustration, but these were unfortunately few and far between. The maps and drawings, where they exist in the book, were excellent.
All in all, a book I'm very glad to have read.
running book list 2012
Started Annals late last year and just finished last night (January 23). Asterisk means I loved it. Hashtag means I didn't like it.
1. Annals of the Former World, by John McPhee
2. Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder
3. How to Live, Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell
4. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote*
5. The Control of Nature, by John McPhee*
6. Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, by Lawrence Weschler
7. Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor*
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O'Connor*
9. The Violent Bear It Away, by Flannery O'Connor*
10. Pakistan, A Hard Country, by Anatol Lieven
11. Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks*
12. Freakonomics, by Stevens Levitt and Dubner#
13. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John LeCarre*
14. The Russia House, by John LeCarre#
15. Hail to the Victors, ed. by Brian Cook
16. The Cave, by Jose Saramago#
17. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald*
18. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by Jonathan Berendt
19. Skinny Dip, by Carl Hiaasen
20. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene*
21. Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov*
22. Irons in the Fire, by John McPhee (again)
23. Tombstone, by Yang Jisheng
24. The Book of Job, trans. by Stephen Mitchell (again)*
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