Annals of the Former World Tapa dura - 1998

Annals of the Former World is a book on geology written by John McPhee and published in 1998 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The book presents a geological history of North America, and was researched and written over the course of two decades beginning in 1978."Most mountain ranges around the world are the result of compression, of segments of the earth's crust being brought together, bent, mashed, thrust and folded, squeezed up into the sky-- the Himalaya, the Appalachians, the Alps, the Urals, the Andes. The ranges of the Basin and Range came up another way, The crust-- in this region between the Rockies and the Sierra-- is spreading out, being stretched, being thinned, being literally pulled to pieces. The sites of Reno and Salt Lake City, on opposite sides of the province, have moved apart fifty miles. The crust of the Great Basin has broken into blocks... irregular in shape. They... suggest stretch marks. Which they are."