--- product_id: 7112147 title: "Annals of the Former World" price: "€ 32.83" currency: EUR in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.sk/products/7112147-annals-of-the-former-world store_origin: SK region: Slovakia --- # Annals of the Former World **Price:** € 32.83 **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Annals of the Former World - **How much does it cost?** € 32.83 with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.sk](https://www.desertcart.sk/products/7112147-annals-of-the-former-world) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Description The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World . Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction. Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. Review: Deep Time - Take a field trip through North America's Basin and Range province, stretching East to West from Utah to California and South to North from Mexico to Oregon, and you're in a land being pulled apart by Tectonic Forces to someday becoming an arm jutting out from North America into the Pacific Ocean. Baja and California will become first a very long peninsula then later a archipelago west of the continent. Our world is indeed changing all around us. If you really love reading about Geology and Geography then John McPhee's Pulitzer Prize winning 1998 book "Annals of the Former World" may be just what you're looking for. It's actually like reading 5 shorter books on different aspects of geology: regional landscapes, exotic features, exploring the craton and even California*. But no matter what your interest are, if you tackle this monumental work of over 700 pages be prepared for lots of technical terminology in the Earth Sciences and Geography along with some interesting bits of cultural-history, biographies of various geologist and what frontier life was like in the various regions covered. Some readers may not like McPhee's frequent philosophical or biographical passages, that can be quite long and cover a lot of ground, but his inner thoughts just reflect his passion for geology and all the related sciences'. For me this was a long, tough but rewarding read. Some portions of the book flowed along smoothly while others left me feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the author's lengthy and technical writing style, so unless you're up for a very challenging read you might want to look elsewhere. But I, for one, found this to be an enjoyable book that took me to remote location around North America, the Globe, and back into Earth's Deep Time exploring the origins of our landscape, where it came from and where it's going. McPhee's writing is very descriptive, giving you a clear picture of the places he, and his geologist friends, were traveling through. There aren't many illustrations in the Kindle edition; a few photos, some charts and maps, so my iPad got a real workout as I looked up various mountain ranges and other geological regions. But it became clear to me that if I were to take a motor trip through the western United States I would want to have a friendly geologist with me just to help me understand what we were looking at. All features on the Earth have a long history and it helps to have some idea of their origins and the events that led to their present condition. In this book you'll learn about sea mounts and hot-spots, plate tectonics and continental drift, how mountains grow and erode away, how seas come and go and how long all this has been going on. Be sure to read the author’s Afterword: “A Narrative Table of Contents”, it will explain a lot of questions you may have. In my case I read it after but it would also make a good introduction to the author and book. The science in this book was cutting-edge in 1998 but things are always changing and new theories can spring up almost overnight. Over the past decade new observations have lead to new ideas and new ways of looking at the land and its history. But things in geology change at a very slow pace, so whatever “dated” material there may be in the text shouldn’t make any difference to the general reader. If you're interested in learning the history of land formations, diamonds, glacial till or just plain old rocks, than "Annals of the Former World" is a good bet! I had no technical or downloading problems with this Kindle edition. *As far as I can tell the text was also published as 4 or 5 different books, one for each chapter. Last Ranger Review: This book is a gem, and may help you find some... - Geology as a page turner! My copy of this book is now so dog eared it looks like a dust brush. I don't know how to praise the writing and this book enough. It will not only make your journeys more enjoyable * By, say, noting how Pt. Reyes is actually a chunk of the Sierra mountains that moved north from the area right about where you go over that huge pass on I5 heading out of the central valley going towards LA. But this book will give you insights into how and where things formed * For example oil is generally former wetlands, often river deltas leading to the ocean that collected all the organics, especially algae and trapped them in the stagnant ponds near the delta outlets over a few million years. Sink them in earth, cook *just right* and the oil migrates to the sand that once formed the berms at the river ocean outlets. The book will give you a feel for the vast scope of time * For example, "lakes" don't really exist except as fleeting dynamic piffles, like eddies in a river. Lakes fill in fast and so only exist right after glaciers retreat or where earth movements are pulling things apart . Rivers themselves come and go like summer rain showers. But they often act as concentrators of the metals we seek. At the same time you get a view of science in action * It chronicles the slow rise of plate tectonics and shows how science really works as contradiction, new data and ideas slowly topple old paradigms even as the data gathered for those old paradigms becomes fodder for the new ... and are not themselves always wrong, at least locally. I could go on and on. All this and more is written in a book that is more of a page turner than most novels I read. A simply stunning job for a normally glacial subject. It does have some downside. No pictures and almost no maps (look right before the index to see what maps there are and mark them with book tags -- helps a lot). McPhee is a great writer, but not being able to actually see and place some of this stuff is very disappointing and often grating. I recommend reading with Google earth booted up and handy -- I wish someone would put together a photo and/or map and or Google geo-location concordance for this book. Even so -- this is one of those books that becomes a treasured friend over time. ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | #43,959 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #4 in Geology (Books) #43 in Travel Writing Reference #245 in U.S. State & Local History | | Customer Reviews | 4.7 out of 5 stars 868 Reviews | ## Images ![Annals of the Former World - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71Sv6F02STL.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Deep Time *by L***R on November 12, 2018* Take a field trip through North America's Basin and Range province, stretching East to West from Utah to California and South to North from Mexico to Oregon, and you're in a land being pulled apart by Tectonic Forces to someday becoming an arm jutting out from North America into the Pacific Ocean. Baja and California will become first a very long peninsula then later a archipelago west of the continent. Our world is indeed changing all around us. If you really love reading about Geology and Geography then John McPhee's Pulitzer Prize winning 1998 book "Annals of the Former World" may be just what you're looking for. It's actually like reading 5 shorter books on different aspects of geology: regional landscapes, exotic features, exploring the craton and even California*. But no matter what your interest are, if you tackle this monumental work of over 700 pages be prepared for lots of technical terminology in the Earth Sciences and Geography along with some interesting bits of cultural-history, biographies of various geologist and what frontier life was like in the various regions covered. Some readers may not like McPhee's frequent philosophical or biographical passages, that can be quite long and cover a lot of ground, but his inner thoughts just reflect his passion for geology and all the related sciences'. For me this was a long, tough but rewarding read. Some portions of the book flowed along smoothly while others left me feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the author's lengthy and technical writing style, so unless you're up for a very challenging read you might want to look elsewhere. But I, for one, found this to be an enjoyable book that took me to remote location around North America, the Globe, and back into Earth's Deep Time exploring the origins of our landscape, where it came from and where it's going. McPhee's writing is very descriptive, giving you a clear picture of the places he, and his geologist friends, were traveling through. There aren't many illustrations in the Kindle edition; a few photos, some charts and maps, so my iPad got a real workout as I looked up various mountain ranges and other geological regions. But it became clear to me that if I were to take a motor trip through the western United States I would want to have a friendly geologist with me just to help me understand what we were looking at. All features on the Earth have a long history and it helps to have some idea of their origins and the events that led to their present condition. In this book you'll learn about sea mounts and hot-spots, plate tectonics and continental drift, how mountains grow and erode away, how seas come and go and how long all this has been going on. Be sure to read the author’s Afterword: “A Narrative Table of Contents”, it will explain a lot of questions you may have. In my case I read it after but it would also make a good introduction to the author and book. The science in this book was cutting-edge in 1998 but things are always changing and new theories can spring up almost overnight. Over the past decade new observations have lead to new ideas and new ways of looking at the land and its history. But things in geology change at a very slow pace, so whatever “dated” material there may be in the text shouldn’t make any difference to the general reader. If you're interested in learning the history of land formations, diamonds, glacial till or just plain old rocks, than "Annals of the Former World" is a good bet! I had no technical or downloading problems with this Kindle edition. *As far as I can tell the text was also published as 4 or 5 different books, one for each chapter. Last Ranger ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This book is a gem, and may help you find some... *by P***R on March 28, 2007* Geology as a page turner! My copy of this book is now so dog eared it looks like a dust brush. I don't know how to praise the writing and this book enough. It will not only make your journeys more enjoyable * By, say, noting how Pt. Reyes is actually a chunk of the Sierra mountains that moved north from the area right about where you go over that huge pass on I5 heading out of the central valley going towards LA. But this book will give you insights into how and where things formed * For example oil is generally former wetlands, often river deltas leading to the ocean that collected all the organics, especially algae and trapped them in the stagnant ponds near the delta outlets over a few million years. Sink them in earth, cook *just right* and the oil migrates to the sand that once formed the berms at the river ocean outlets. The book will give you a feel for the vast scope of time * For example, "lakes" don't really exist except as fleeting dynamic piffles, like eddies in a river. Lakes fill in fast and so only exist right after glaciers retreat or where earth movements are pulling things apart . Rivers themselves come and go like summer rain showers. But they often act as concentrators of the metals we seek. At the same time you get a view of science in action * It chronicles the slow rise of plate tectonics and shows how science really works as contradiction, new data and ideas slowly topple old paradigms even as the data gathered for those old paradigms becomes fodder for the new ... and are not themselves always wrong, at least locally. I could go on and on. All this and more is written in a book that is more of a page turner than most novels I read. A simply stunning job for a normally glacial subject. It does have some downside. No pictures and almost no maps (look right before the index to see what maps there are and mark them with book tags -- helps a lot). McPhee is a great writer, but not being able to actually see and place some of this stuff is very disappointing and often grating. I recommend reading with Google earth booted up and handy -- I wish someone would put together a photo and/or map and or Google geo-location concordance for this book. Even so -- this is one of those books that becomes a treasured friend over time. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A tour de force amongst science books for the layman *by R***D on March 9, 2023* Yes it was penned for the layman but make no mistake, Annals of the Former World is a comprehensive treatise on North American geology containing enough hard science to surely please even an academic in the field. Writing in a wonderfully disarming anecdotal style, McPhee primarily covers the geology of several parts of the U.S. but also addresses other parts of the world including Europe, southeast Asia, and South America. Also included are mini-biographies of several prominent geologists and other historical figures wrapped in together with the geology material. Although three of the five volumes of this compilation were originally published in the 1980s, I found in doing a bit of web browsing while reading this book that our understanding of the Earth’s plates and their movements over the last few hundred million years hasn’t fundamentally changed since then. Going back further in geologic time, the vision in Annals becomes considerably murkier with the exception perhaps of the coverage of the ancient core of the North American continent in Book 5 (Crossing the Craton). It’s likely that research and field work over the last twenty years has shed more light on the time period of say 250 to 1000 million years ago (mya). It’s possible that we may never have a clear idea of what the Earth’s land masses really looked like before ~1000 mya, due to the unknowns of what became of land that dove into the mantle at subduction zones at so many plate boundaries and so many times over many hundreds of millions of years. In addition, the lack of skeletal vertebrate life before around 400 mya makes the fossil record much spottier before then and hence, the older layers of rock around the world much more difficult to reliably index to each other in time. Annals is easily one of the best books I’ve read. I’m not surprised at all that it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 in the General Nonfiction category. Over 650 pages but I wish it had been longer! --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.sk/products/7112147-annals-of-the-former-world](https://www.desertcart.sk/products/7112147-annals-of-the-former-world) --- *Product available on Desertcart Slovakia* *Store origin: SK* *Last updated: 2026-05-19*