Books like Basin and range by John McPhee

John McPhee’s survey of North American geology, tracing the continent’s history through detailed fieldwork, maps and essays on plate tectonics and the geological time scale.

John McPhee’s collection of essays follows four men through three distinct wildernesses—the Atlantic coastline, the Western mountain range, and the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River—examining their varied relationships with nature.

"The Founding Fish, John McPhee's twenty-sixth book, is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. McPhee is a shad fisherman. He waits all year for the short spring season when delicious American shad - Alosa sapidissima - leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run up rivers heroic distances to spawn. He approaches them with a catch-and-eat philosophy. After all, their specific name means "most savory."". "McPhee presents his obsession in bold and spirited prose, laced with humor. His research illuminates the sometimes surprising relevance of this fish in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, and its unique appeal to imaginative historians. George Washington was a commercial shad fisherman - in 1771, he caught 7,760 American shad. The fish had a cameo role in the lives of Henry David Thoreau and John Wilkes Booth. Planked shad (shad nailed to a board and broiled before an open fire) was invented by the Colony in Schuylkill, a Philadelphia fishing club founded in 1732, which now considers itself the fourteenth of the fifty-one united states."--BOOK JACKET.

John A. McPhee examines the techniques and ideas people apply to master nature, from flood control and engineering to managing volcanic eruptions and debris avalanches.

A mother's journey to China with her adopted child and the unexpected cultural discovery that shapes the bond between them.