Science Friday - John McPhee’s Annals Of The Former World. July 9, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

Writing, Like Geology, Requires A Little Digging When author John McPhee first considered the piece of writing that would become his 1998 book, Annals of the Former World, he envisioned a short, un-bylined article in The New Yorker, in which he would visit a road cut on Route 80—a piece that could probably be completed in a few days. Instead, that idea became a 700-page coast to coast exploration of the geology of North America, a project that took over 20 years to complete. In this archival interview, recorded in June 1999, McPhee talks with Ira Flatow about the process of reporting Annals of the Former World, which had just won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. They talk about rocks, maps, and geology, of course—but also about characters, nuclear physics, migrating fish, and the craft of writing. McPhee, who also teaches nonfiction writing at Princeton University, likened his teaching role to that of a previous job as a swimming coach. “The people I was teaching swimming [to] all knew how to swim,” he said. “What I was trying to do was to help them swim better, to streamline them. And that's very analogous to talking to people about writing. I'm not teaching anyone to write. I'm just helping people with little ideas that they may or may not pick up." Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. This hour, we're opening up the SciFRI Vault and setting the Wayback Machine to 1999, 22 years ago. Our destination, a conversation with writer John McPhee about his geologic epic annals of the former world. Let me set the scene for you. When this conversation was recorded, the UN was struggling with how to aid refugees from the war in Kosovo. Bill Clinton was president. And then Texas Governor George W. Bush had just announced his intention to seek the Republican presidential nomination. And the day after this conversation, the Dallas Stars defeated the Buffalo Sabres in triple overtime of game six of the Stanley Cup finals. Sad news for me, Buffalo is where I got started in radio. But the good news, McPhee's book Annals of the Former World first published in 1998, won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. So have a listen. A literary legend is going to join us at this hour on Science Friday.

John McPhee is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of 25 books on subjects as diverse as oranges, the pine barons, and nuclear physics. Two of his books, encounters with the Ark Druid and the Curve of Binding Energy, were nominated for National Book Awards in the science category. In 1977, he received the award in literature

from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and more recently, the coveted Pulitzer Prize for his latest book, Annals of the Former World. He also teaches nonfiction writing at Princeton University and joins us today from the campus there. John McPhee, welcome to the program. Hello, Ira.

Hi. Nice to be here. Thank you. Everybody's interested when they pick up this huge volume, and it's a big one. and a lot of good reading in it. The Annals of the former world, it started out very innocently, did it not? Is a short little piece you were going to be doing for the New Yorker?

Yes, it did. I had the idea to do a talk of the town piece in the New Yorker, a short, unsigned article about a road cut outside New York City somewhere and go there, describe the history of that rock. It's environment of deposition or whatever. and tell the story in the first person plural, and a couple of days later, I'm all done. That's how this started. And while I was still thinking about it and talking to the professor in Princeton, it was going to do it with me.

I got the idea of going up the Adirondack Northway through all those beautiful outcroppings in a really stunning road and maybe extend the piece of a little. And he said, his name is Ken DeFaise, and he's a prince. and professor who's been with me through this whole project counseling me. He said, not on this continent. He said, if you want to do that sort of thing, go west, go across the structure. Because the way North America is anatomically organized, all this stuff goes north and south, the physiographic provinces, the rock, the deformed Appalachians and the Rockies and so forth.

and he said go across the structure. And so I got the idea to really go across it, to describe North America from one ocean to the other in a geological way. And that's when I fell in so far over my head that I didn't know what I was doing. And that was 21 years ago. Did you have to teach yourself everything about it? Because there are so many extensive references. You speak like you're an expert geologist in it.

Did it take a long time to learn all these things? I mean, I hope I learned something in 20 years that the project took. I had studied geology in school and in a very good course. It was basically geomorphology, I think. And all through the years, I talked with geologists about things in various books of mine trying to get it right, where a little paragraph had come up describing something geological. But basically, I didn't know much at all.

And I just found myself, I mean, nervously in deep, but I learned a great deal. I went to courses. I went to a lot of it was one-on-one. I traveled for years with geologists, and they taught me right there in the field. And I read, of course, a great many scientific papers, and I have a shelf of basic textbooks. It must be four or five feet wide. and slowly something soaked in. And one of the great things about your book is that you managed to take is science

that most of us probably don't know too much about or appreciate it, and you show us how it really shaped our world. And one example in particular you give is New York City, a place that seems about as remote from the natural world as you can get. I like to go out into Central Park and watch the stones that are left over from the ice sheets that used to be down here during the ice age. But you even have a more interesting story about how geology shaped New York in a different way. And the skyline, and why we have skyscrapers in certain places in New York.

How about if I read that paragraph to you? That's great. I was with Anita Harris. And Anita Harris is a U.S. Geological Survey paleontologist who, a conodont paleontologist, who grew up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. And she says that she went into geology to get out of there. and she and I went to New York one day, and as we were approaching the city from her cousin's place in New Jersey and looking at the Manhattan skyline, now I'm going to start reading from the book, Anita asked me if I had ever wondered why there was a low saddle in the city between the stands of tall buildings. I said I'd always assumed that skyline was shaped by human considerations, commercial, historical, ethnic. Who could imagine a little Italy in a skyscraper, a linoleum warehouse up in the clouds?

The towers of Midtown, as one might imagine, were emplaced in substantial rock, Anita said. Rock that once had been heated near the point of melting and had recrystallized, and had been heated again, had recrystallized, and while not particularly competent, was more than adequate to hold up those buildings. Most important, it was right at the surface. you could see it in all its micaceous glitter shining like silver in the outcrops of Central Park. 450 million years in age it was called Manhattan Schist. All through Midtown it was at or near the surface.

But in the region south of 30th Street, it began to fall away. And at Washington Square, it descended abruptly. The whole saddle between Midtown and Wall Street would be underwater, were it not filled with many, tens of fathoms of glacial till. The ice sheet brought it. So there sat Greenwich Village, Soho, Chinatown, on material that could not hold up a great deal more than a golf tea, on the ground-up, wreckage of the ramipose, on crushed catskill, on odd bits of Nyack and Tenefly, which the ice brought. In the Wall Street area, the bedrock does not return to the surface, but it comes within 40 feet and is accessible for the footings of the tallest buildings in town.

in town. New York grew high on the advantage of its hard rock, and New York being what it is, cities all over the world have attempted to resemble it. The skyline of nuclear Houston, for example, is a simulacrum of Manhattan's skyline. Houston rests on 12,000 feet of Montmeralinitic clay, a substance that, when moist, turns in a mobile jelly. After taking so much money out of the ground, the oil companies of Houston have put hundreds of millions back in. Houston is the world's foremost city in fat basements. Its tall buildings are magnified duckpins bobbing in their own mire. That's a great description.

I have to also mention that I noticed that while you were reading some of your own work, you were actually editing some of it along the way. Does the writing process ever stop? Well, it doesn't stop when you're reading something on NPR and realize that if you're saying that there are little bits of TenaFly and Ramapo in Soho, you better explain it. I noticed, and anybody who reads the book can't help but notice that you have certain characters and they're real-life people in the book, geologists that you find along the way who stand

out and who become almost our friends. And I'm talking in one case here about David Love, who's the geologists who guides you through Wyoming. And you say in your book that he is the only person in the history of American geology who has served as a senior author of a state map. twice. And that I gather is quite an accomplishment. Tell us about the work that goes on into making a state map. Well, as I said somewhere in this book, a geologic map is a textbook on one sheet of paper. Just a tremendous amount of geology goes into the representation that's on that map.

basically a geologic map is a picture of the uppermost rock in a given area like say a state Wyoming if you were looking at it aerially the top rock is the one depicted in the map if soil is there it's the it's still the top rock below the soil if glacial stuff is there that's usually left off, stuff that the glacier smeared over the bedrock. And so you see the relationship of the uppermost rock in the rock column. You don't see everything going down below it. And it's a synthesis, a geologic map of pretty much everything it's been written about the rock in the state. And so you can see the amount of work could be involved in it.

In 19-whatever, David Love is the senior author of the first one, and I think in 1985 the present map was published. He'd done this twice, which means he's, you know, he lives 300 years or something in effect. Did you have to become a mapmaker to really understand how he does these things? Well, not a map maker, but I've always loved maps. I just can just get into a map room. and lose all sense of time.

And Princeton has a wonderful map room in the geology library, a really superb one. And, you know, I just go there and I love to hang around and look at these maps. I don't have, I don't have difficulty figuring out where I am on them. Get inspiration from them? Yes. But also, if I'm doing a piece about anything, I mean, like right now, I've been doing something that involves Holyoke, Massachusetts, and I'll go down to that same library and look at the topographic maps, the largest scale maps of Holyoke.

So I can just see the layout and sometimes you pick up wonderful place names that way and you get accurate distances and so on. But the maps always suggest something. We need to take a break. You're listening to a conversation with writer John McPhee recorded 22 years ago in June of 1999 about his book, Annals of the Former World. More rock talk with John McPhee in just a moment. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. This hour, we're dipping into the Science Friday archives for a conversation with author John McPhee recorded in June of 1999 about his wonderful book. Annals of the former world first published in 1998, and it became the 1999 winner of the Pulitzer

Prize for general nonfiction. Can you sit down and write something once like Isaac Asimov used to do and be happy with it, or how many times you have to go over and refinish it and rework it and rework it and rework it. Paul Lenny, Isaac Asimov, whatever he did, I'm sure I don't do. It's a process of many, many, many, many revisions. Basically, four trips through the whole manuscript, but there's just countless subdivisions of that. But I work with about four full drafts, a first draft that takes a very long time and then the others take less. But, you know, there's a romantic idea about writers who are so facile. that they quote, don't have to blot a line.

But boy, that is not this writer. And actually, I feel that one of the basic fundamentals about writing is that you do have a chance to change things. You can work it over and improve it until you see something you want. It really is like sculpture and artwork, is it not, that you can just change it a little here, move a little there. Pushing words around, I guess. Yeah, make it look exactly the way you want to and then come back a little bit, later and say, I didn't like that. Let me go back to the way it used to be. How do you teach your students to be writers? Or can you teach people to be writers? Well, an analogy that I have used

now and again about that is that I think I see myself more as a coach, or say a swimming teacher, which is something I used to do years ago. And the people I was teaching swimming, all knew how to swim. What I was trying to do was to help them swim better, to streamline them, to make them more efficiently, help them more efficiently to use the relationship with the water. And that's very analogous to talking to people about writing. I mean, I'm not teaching anyone to write. I'm just helping people with little ideas that they may or may not pick up from me. I have no way of knowing what it is that sticks with them. I just like talking to them privately about their compositions. Let's go to the phones to Nancy in Portland, Oregon. Hi, Nancy.

Hi. I don't have my radio on, so I can't tell whether you can hear me or not. But I turned to, the mute on. I just wanted to, I don't have a question for Mr. McPhee. I just want to tell him that I'm a fan of his and have been ever since I read, oh gosh, the survival of the bark canoe, having been raised in Canada, born and raised in Canada, I was thrilled with that. I think the thing that I really wanted to thank him for was the purity and beauty of his writing. I can get as lost in his nonfiction as I can in a good fiction book. And I've read, I think the fun thing for me was when I moved from Ohio to Portland, my son joined me in Laramie, Wyoming as I came alone along in my car.

and he happened to have with him, and I don't know whether it was rising from the plains or basin and range, but he had borrowed the book from a friend, and as we drove from Laramie up through to the Teton's, I read aloud to him and myself about the terrain we were going through, and it was just terrific. It was fun. It was interesting to see what he was. was describing and I went, I guess maybe he can tell me whether it was rising from the plains or basin and range. I have basin and range here, but it's been some years since I've read it. Well, thank you for calling, Nancy. You're welcome. Thank you, Nancy. Thanks very much. It was

rising from the plains. And the annals of the former world, it's a compendium. It's five volumes. did and the and the four of the volumes are pieces you've done before right and the fifth volume is an original is the is new stuff it happened like this when when i got together the that project and and got the idea of traversing the entire continent i did so for the next year and a half thinking i was doing a piece of writing that i would do in a year or two and that was that was going to be it And when I piled up all my notes and I'd traveled with Anita and David Love and Eldridge Moors in California and Ken DeFaise, I realized that I couldn't cope with this in less than 10 years and that I wouldn't be doing anything else. And I'm a general nonfiction writer. So I had built a structure for the whole piece of writing and it separated itself into, several parts well enough still following that same structure. And so I decided to write them separately and then go off to other things in between. And that's how it developed. And so

parts of it were published along the way, always saying in the flaps that these titles were gathering under the overall title, Annals of the Former World. And so I finally completed it in 1998, but what I was doing was following the outline that had been developed in in 1979. Do you think you've got geology out of your system now? No. I don't think I have it out of my system, but I'll tell you that I'm writing about fish. You're writing about fish? That's right. The only rocky thing in a fish is an odolith. These fish are marine animals or lakefish are all fish?

or they're an adrimus fish. You write in such great detail. Do you carry, how do you keep track of the detail in your book? Well, do you have a tape recorder with you? You're taking notes as it's going on? Both. Yeah. Both.

I mean, first of all, notes in a notebook are my preferred way of soaking things up. But if someone speaks too rapidly and is also articulate and doesn't seem to care about it, I use a tape recorder. because if I can't keep up, what can I do? The tape recorder does. Or I'm in Vermont, say, as one of the passages in Annals of the former world. And there's 14 celebrated Appalachian geologists arguing over an outcrop. Can I take down all this?

So what you do is put the little tape recorder on the outcrop and let them argue. And the tape recorder listens to them. So I do supplement the note-taking with a tape recorder when I have to. Let's go to Eileen in Oakland, California. Hi, Eileen. Hi, thanks for taking my call. I'm a big fan of Mr. McPhee. And I've always wondered, though, why he doesn't put more maps in his books.

I'm a geologist. Yeah, I like that. I agree with you on that one. Yeah. So I'm going to take the answer off the air. Thanks so much. Thanks. Yeah.

Put some more maps in those books. Well, I'm cranky. First of all, I always assumed that a map was handy to a person who wanted to look something up. And in Annals of the Former World, we did do maps from a U.S. Geological Survey base map of the landsforms and drainagees of North America. We, with Stuart Allen, a cartographer in Medford, Oregon, we made 25 maps to specifically address certain places in the book. So I hope that that helps, Celine. Well, we'll find out after she's done reading it. Let's go to Ian in San Diego. Hi. Hi, go ahead. Hi, Ira. I understand that your guest, Mr. McAfee, wrote the Curve of the Binding Energy. Is that true?

That's right. Well, the curve of the binding energy was one of the more influential books I've ever read. I think it might be instructive to your listeners to hear how I came across this book. I originally was given a book by my wife, who was a librarian, called The Mushroom, or Mushroom, or something like that. Princeton, who had Freeman Dyson as his instructor, and he proposed to do a term paper. He was not the brightest post, almost, a paper on a terrorist group building a nuclear device. and Freeman Dyson, who is one of the physicists on the Manhattan Project, anything. But when the guy came to pick up his paper,

he found that it had been classified. Not only had this guy figured out how to build a bomb, but he had fully figured out how to yield in the multi-kiloton range. And one of the references that he cited was the curve of the binding energy. And so I tracked down this book to find out, and sure enough, I believe it's, was about Teddy Taylor, who was one of the foremost builders, or at least designers of, and you gave a complete, all the things you had to watch for and all that stuff, which was a real

revelation. So my question to you is this, following up on that, one of the things that student mentioned was that he was tracked down by the Pakistani government in order to get the mechanisms for build, become a reality. Pakistan now has a... you know, efficient device. And what are your thoughts about nuclear devices being your 21st century, following a lot of the descriptions given in the now public domain, binding energy, the released Manhattan Project and so on? Well, the reason the curve of binding energy was written was because of that fear,

among other things. Your account of all this is not wholly, I mean, it suggests that one could read the curve of binding energy and build a bomb from that. That's just not so. And nor was it true of, I think it was David McAhalas's thesis here in Princeton. But the general idea that a small group of people or even one person can do it was Taylor's idea. And he felt that it was not being, it was not being given credence. And so this is why that he talked to me about it.

And of course, I would fear that in the future like anyone else. But they wouldn't learn how to do it from my book because the book stopped short of that in all respects. So you don't feel guilty that joy anything to do with someone building a bomb. No, I thought long and hard about whether to discuss this subject at all. And as a matter of fact, in the interviewing that I did at Los Alamos and Brooke, Haven and everywhere, I spent more than half of my interviewing time asking people to tell me why I should not write this versus why I should. And the net of it was that it seemed to be a good idea to do it. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Kayser just joining us. You're listening

to a 1999 conversation with author John McPhee about geology and the craft of writing. One of the more fascinating parts of geology, and you talk about it, lots and all you in your works are the road cuts that you find. And you're able to become an instant geologist by studying them and actually going back. And you mentioned that in a few places you can go back billions of years in some of these road cuts that you find around the country. I remember many years ago stopping by, I think outside of Denver on my way back from Boulder, Colorado. There was an actually an exit ramp onto a road cut. and then with a whole diorama of what you're looking at, it'll cross the whole base in there and the whole flatlands of Colorado.

Well, that is one spectacular place where above Denver, where... You know what I'm talking about, yeah. Well, it goes through the so-called hogback, which is Cretaceous rock that a curious sort of stegosaurus-looking, looks like the back of a dinosaur or something that crawls along the mountain front, right? Parallels the Rockies for hundreds of miles. And that road cut is spectacular. outside Denver, and there's actually geological exhibits there.

Yeah. And these, and you know, I don't think enough people, enough states or localities, you know, pay enough attention to these that turn them into learning centers or educational points for people who are interested in them. Well, I wish they did in more places. For example, if you go from, in Wyoming, if you go through the, where the wind river goes into Wind River Canyon and it comes out the other end and is the Big Horn River. And the reason is that nobody understood for a long while that it was the same river that it was a Lincoln Tunnel

or something. It goes in one side and comes out the other. And the state of Wyoming has labeled the rock in Wind River Canyon. And it's with with its age and its type and it's extremely interesting to do. And this could be done in many more places in the country. You know, when the astronauts went to the moon, they looked back on Earth and they saw the tiny little blue marble there, so to speak. They had a feeling about the fragility of Earth. And you go in just the opposite, and you go get closer and closer to the rocks and look very closely at their makeup. Is there a different kind of sense of awe? What is the feeling you get at when you come away from traversing the whole country, looking at the basement of the earth here?

Well, I don't know. I mean, because, you know, everything over all those years involved rock out crops exposed by the interstate or exposed somewhere else. And the, I guess, unconformities are a place where you can be moved. If you can put your finger as you can in the Delaware water gap, for example, as you can in thousands and thousands of places. You put your finger in one spot and it's, it's, there's two sides, there's a break there. And the two sides are, say, 10 million years apart. And your finger covers the 10 million years. It's, it's impressive. It's not, I mean, in its own up-close way. You mentioned the astronauts looking at the little thing. You know, when plate tectonics was more controversial than it is now, the theory is pretty

much in place and people argue about it somewhat less. But in the 1970s, when it was brand new, it was much argued. And one of the early astronauts was a trained geologist, Harrison Schmidt. He's up in the air and he is looking in space and he's looking down at the AFR triangle, at he's looking at Africa and and Arabia and he's looking at the Red Sea and you can see just like a jigsaw puzzle you can see the earth coming apart there it's about five million years that that that has taken for the Red Sea to develop and so it's all very new and he said one look at that and it'll make a believer out of anybody a believer in plate tectonics. I'm talking with author John McPhee. We need to take a short break. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. In case you're just joining us, you're listening to a 1999 conversation with author John McPhee. He's talking about writing, geology, and more. Let's go to the phones. Lots of folks want to talk to you.

And let's go to Ben in Dallas. Hi, Ben. Well, hello there. First, I want to thank John for the whole. hundreds of hours of pleasure he has given me being able to read his books. In fact, has inspired me to go do some research on my own.

I guess the last place I went was to the Chaffalaia Basin there where nature is being fought. And now, so hopefully that's the case. The question I have is, John, you've got such a variety of topics that you cover, so you're obviously doing a great deal of research. What is the ratio of time you spend on the road doing your research and visiting with people

compared to the amount of time that you spend actually doing the writing? Well, I do have an answer for that, and it may surprise you, but if I'm on the road, I once figured out that for every day that I was out on the road researching things out there, I spent 10 in my office at home. Wow. But of course that, I mean, the first phase is to go out with people, travel with geologists, travel in Alaska, whatever it is. But then, of course, before I start writing, there's a great deal of time at home reading about the subject

and sorting over those notes and doing background reading and so on. So that's all part of being home. But the Alaska project was other than this one, the longest I remember. And it was about three years that I worked on that. And in that time, I would go up to Alaska for four months, for three months, for two months, and back to Princeton and back up there after several months. And so that in a three-year period, there were maybe four trips more or less like that. I wanted to be there in the four seasons.

You really seem to have a pension for finding the right people to talk to also. Is that through referral or your research? It's referral and I've always felt that it was luck. I mean, of course, you don't know who you didn't meet, right? I mean, you don't know what, but they indeed have been an amazing array of people. And if you get into a subject and then you just start, you know, talking to people and hanging around the subject for a while, sometimes that leads to the person, as it was the case with Ted Taylor in the curve of binding energy.

I want to ask you to read another chapter from your book, another passage from your book, about the concept of geologic time. It's really something very difficult for people to understand, is it not, about how long geologic time is and how it's hard for us to get a handle on it? Yes, indeed it is. and geologists are forever trying to find in metaphors to cope with this question, to try to give a sense of time, the relationship between our sense of time and the earths, the vast difference, how to express that, so on.

And this passage attempts to address that as follows. When a volcano lets fly or an earthquake brings down a mountainside, people look upon the event with surprise and report it to each other as news. People, in their whole history, have seen comparatively few such events, and only in the past couple of hundred years have they begun to sense the patterns the events represent. human time, regarded in the perspective of geologic time, is much too thin to be discerned, the mark invisible at the end of a ruler. If geologic time could somehow be seen in the perspective of human time, on the other hand, sea level would be rising and falling hundreds of feet, ice would come pouring over continents as quickly and as quickly go away, Yucatans in Florida's would be under the sun one moment and underwater the next.

Oceans would swing open like doors. Mountains would grow like clouds and come down like melting sherbet. Contonants would crawl like amoebe. Rivers would arrive and disappear like rain streaks down an umbrella. Lakes would go away like puddles after rain and volcanoes would light the earth as if it were a garden full of fireflies. At the end of the program, man shows up his ticket in his hand. Almost at once, he conceives of private property, dimension stone, and life insurance. When Mount St. Helens assaults his sensibilities with an ash cloud, 11 miles high,

he writes a letter to the New York Times recommending that the mountain be bombed. That really happened? Yes, I read that. I remember the letter. Boy, we really think we're something. I mean, that's part of the thing. We really think we're something. And then you go on, you look at, you know, as you mentioned before, how many billions and millions of years you can cover with just the palm of your hand when you go to a groundcropping of rock.

Right. Let's see how short a time we really occupy on us. Ted and, is it Roselle, New Jersey? Yes. Hi, Ted. All right. What a pleasure it is to talk to John. You've been so much, you've given me so much pleasure over the years.

From the pine barons through basin and range and assembling California. Alaska. I'm mostly housebound, but I travel with you and I appreciate it so much. I would like to ask you a question about a book that you don't talk much about, the lemon yellow deltoid pumpkin seed. Yes. What did you want to ask? Whatever happened to that project? That project is still where it was when the book was finished in 1977 or four, whenever it was, the flight tests occurred. The company still exists.

The president is still trying to interest people in the data. However, the mission has changed over the years. And he was attempting to do some aircraft They would do radar picketing and so on. And so it isn't really quite the same anymore. But if there was one word that characterized that story, it was perseverance. I mean, they've been going on for 40 years or whatever. Well, it was a remarkable story.

And I had to admire the will to keep on going that the man exhibited. But I guess it's just another one of those great inventions. that didn't pan out, like the electric tuning fork. Right. And recently there's been an announcement from a major company Lockheed or something like that, saying that they're going to be doing something like it, that is using helium to lift big loads in a machine, something like that. Yeah. Well, thank you for talking to me. I appreciate it. Great. Thanks for your remarks, Ted. You're welcome.

Goodbye. There's always a lot of talk about bringing back helium-powered all types of. blimps and dirigible and things like that. Who do you read for? I mean, you, you, yeah, I have to have some time to do some reading, I'm assuming. Who are some of your science writers or some of natural history writers that you really admire? Well, Jonathan Weiner, I read the books of my former students, which are now proliferating so much. I have a time to keep up with that.

And I read very miscellaneously. what am I reading right now? I'm reading about, I'm reading Stephen Ambrose's book on Lewis and Clark. That's one of my favorite authors, Stephen Ambrose. And I read, the answer is that I read completely, miscellaneously, and more for recreation than anything else now. In my work, such as, you know, there's always a great pile of things that need to be read and studied in order to get ready for the next piece of writing.

And so I will seek things quite different in historical subjects and novels and so on that are, you know, they're recreational for me. Yeah. You say that you're concentrating on fish now. Why fish? Well, I have an interest in certain fish that run up rivers to spawn. And I'm just trying to do an article about that subject, about ocean fish that come into. freshwater. Let's go to David in Durham, North Carolina.

Hi, David. Hi, how are you? I'm a big fan and actually a teacher of scientific writing and I've used Mr. McPhee's work a number of times as examples. My question is this. My sister is a geophysicist. Actually, she gave me the annals as a present last year. And with that in mind, I'd like to ask whether the narrative thrust of the work that paints geology

too descriptively and shortchanges the more theoretical computational work that is the of a lot of interesting stuff that's being done. Well, I guess someone would have to say that who felt that. The people in this latter category that you described have told me that if they're not in touch with field geologists, they feel they're not in touch. The great bulk of very important work in geologies being done in geophysics and in places where you don't go out and bang on an outcrop. but it's all related. And remember, my purpose is to just is not to teach fundamental geology in all

respects, but to describe that the geology of North America at about this latitude, the New York latitude, from ocean to ocean, and that's what I set out to do. There's a passage on the tension between so-called black box geologists and field geologists somewhere in rising from the plains. Right, right. But I don't think these things are incompatible. No, no. All right, thanks for calling, David. Thank you. Would you not consider then your book's reference books, John McPhee? Well, to the extent that they serve as reference books, that's fine. In fact, Annel's of the former world does touch on a great many geological subjects, including the one that we've just been mentioning.

And I mean, a whole lot of what's in Annals of the former world, to go back to David's question, I mean, rests on seismology and geophysics. The whole of book five in here is in that category. And you don't understand plate tectonics without. it and so forth. For this reason, when we were preparing annals of the former world, we did an index. I worked for three months on email with a wonderful person named Julie Kawabata in Medford, Oregon, who in, no, sorry, in Portland, who is an indexer. And we went back and forth because she wasn't a, you know, her knowledge of geology was not

at the, quite mine, and my knowledge of indexing was nil. And this indexes is not short. And it helps the reference aspect. Also, the book begins with 14 pages, which describe the whole project. It's a roadmap to the whole thing. And thus, thus you could either read it through if you wanted to or use it as a reference because all, in those 14 pages and the table of contents, tense that recapitulates them, all the subjects that are covered in the book and where they are mentioned. So it would serve as a reference given that item up front. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. You're listening to a 1999 conversation with author John McPhee, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Annals of the Former World.

Holly in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, hi. Hi. I'm so happy I got through. I got in my car with a few minutes left of your program and realized my favorite author was on. I'm honored to speak with you. I wanted to say I was a liberal arts major in college 10 years ago, and I was assigned to read the curve of binding energy. And I thought, I groaned because it was nuclear fission at something that didn't interest me at all. And I tell you, not only did it open up that whole world for me, but it opened up the power of, nonfiction literature and essays and, uh, and introduced me to, to John McPhee. And I came away with an understanding of nuclear fission as well. Uh, so I just wanted to, to relay that. That it, it really, uh, it was, it was a moment in college that I dreaded. And, uh, and now I've come to

appreciate. John McKeon, John, do you have a vision of people reading your book as they, as they, as you write it, what they, they, they are or what they'll get out of it? No, I have no idea, except that, I always have an attitude toward readers that they know more than I do. Is that right? You bet. Is that the style that you use is to readers who you think know more than you do? Well, I just think it makes sense. If you publish a book and X,000 people read it, there's going to be people in there and a lot of them who are swifter and subtler and more sensitive and everything else than you are.

I mean, it just has to be. and I have that reader in mind. So you're afraid of criticism, it sounds like that. No, not at all. I mean that you leave, you let the, you stop short of nudging the reader in the ribs and saying, get it? You don't, you don't do that. Oh, no, it's not being afraid of criticism.

It's a matter of what is in and what is not in the composition. Well, it's a fantastic book, Annals of the former world. and I thank you very much for joining us and talking about it this hour. Thank you, Ira. It's a pleasure. You're welcome, John McPhee, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Annals of the Former World, published by Farras Strauss and Giroux, and it's a great book to pick up.

That conversation was recorded 22 years ago, hard to believe, in June of 1999. And if you like taking a look back at Science History, then check out our newsletter series, Science Friday Rewind in which we look back on the decades of discovery recorded in Science Friday's 30 years of archives. From the career of Jane Goodall to the rise of the Earth Day environmental movement to the history of HIV and AIDS research, hop into our audio time machine for a trip through science history. You'll find that and more all at science friday.com slash rewind.

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Yeah, we're going to talk about everything you'll be. wanted to know about sweat. That's on the SciFri Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. Of course, you can only say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or you can email us the classic way, our address, SciFri at Science Friday.com. Please send us feedback and tell us what you'd like us to cover. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.