He focuses on studying the geological patterns found in roadcuts along Interstate 80 in California and Nevada. To communicate how time impacts the continent North Americans call home, McPhee describes the North American landscape at various periods in time, going back to the Triassic period over 250 million years ago. Those concepts are: plate tectonics and time. The first book, Basin and Range, is framed as a primer on geology, and thus it contains two large “set pieces,” as McPhee describes them, on a pair of concepts that have shaped Planet Earth from an earlier date and for a longer period of time than any other geologic forces. Annals of the Former World won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1999, giving McPhee his first Pulitzer win after being nominated on three separate earlier occasions. It also includes a fifth book of newly published material, sorted under the chapter title, Crossing the Craton. Presented as a geological history of America, the book collects articles written for magazines like The New Yorker, as well as the contents of four books McPhee had researched and written between 19: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising From the Plains, and Assembling California. Annals of the Former World is a 1998 collection of nonfiction works on geology by the renowned science writer John McPhee.
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