Basin and Range

I had been ploughing my way through this 1982 John McPhee book, sometimes at an appropriately languorous pace, for some time, but I knew it made sense to finish it out here in the Rockies. It is a quintessential (non-fans would probably call it typical) piece of McPhee, rambling at times, not always clear in its trajectory, but one that rewards the patience of a reader who can just roll with the narrator. The moral of the story here is that the earth's history is long and humanity will almost certainly prove a short chapter of it, but also that science is fluid, ever-evolving, many-faceted and made by excitable and diligent humans driven by a broad range of motivations. McPhee chooses on fact to encapsulate the work, that the top of Mt Everest is made of marine limestone.

Somewhere in there it occurred to me that, having discovered the New Yorker of William Shawn when I was going out with Hilary at Yale and realizing that there was a whole perspective on the world that I had missed growing up in NC where I had heard of but never really grasped what it was, I have in more recent years spent more and more time in it, reading so many of the classic New Yorker writers of the day in book form, first and foremost McPhee and John Brooks, but also others.

In the car on the way from the Denver airport out here I realized I knew rather little of Shawn and, indeed, often got him confused in my mind with his some Wallace, star or both The Princess Bride and My Dinner with Andre, neither of which, I must admit, I have ever seen. So I looked up Shawn the elder on Wikipedia. Turns out he was born William Chon, son of a non-observant East European Jew, who changed his name somewhere along the way, which hung together with so much of the intellectual history of the 20th. He was also very shy and eccentric and had a child later diagnosed with autism as well as a University of Michigan drop out, so his biography had a little catnip for all members of our family.