Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Assembling California
Download Assembling California full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Assembling California ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Assembling California by : John McPhee
Download or read book Assembling California written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.
Book Synopsis Annals of the Former World by : John McPhee
Download or read book Annals of the Former World written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2000-06-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis California's Amazing Geology by : Donald R. Prothero
Download or read book California's Amazing Geology written by Donald R. Prothero and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: California has some of the most distinctive and unique geology in the United States. It is the only state with all three types of plate boundaries, an extraordinary history of earthquakes and volcanoes, and it has many rocks and minerals found nowhere else. The Golden State includes both the highest and lowest point in the continental US and practically every conceivable geological feature known. This book discusses not only the important geologic features of each region in California, but also the complex geologic four-dimensional puzzle of how California was assembled, beginning over 2 billion years ago. The author provides up-to-date and authoritative review of the geology and geomorphology of each geologic province, as well as recent revelations of tectonic history of California’s past. There are separate chapters on some of California’s distinctive geologic resources, including gold, oil, water, coastlines, and fossils. An introductory section describes basic rock and mineral types and fundamental aspects of plate tectonics, so that students and other readers can make sense of the bizarre, wild, and crazy jigsaw puzzle that is California's geological history.
Download or read book Basin and Range written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 1982-04-01 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world—a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting for a lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.
Book Synopsis Assembling Life by : David W. Deamer
Download or read book Assembling Life written by David W. Deamer and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Assembling Life, David Deamer addresses questions that are the cutting edge of research on the origin of life. For instance, how did non-living organic compounds assemble into the first forms of primitive cellular life? What was the source of those compounds and the energy that produced the first nucleic acids? Did life begin in the ocean or in fresh water on terrestrial land masses? Could life have begun on Mars? The book provides an overview of conditions on the early Earth four billion years ago and explains why fresh water hot springs are a plausible alternative to salty seawater as a site where life can begin. Deamer describes his studies of organic compounds that were likely to be available in the prebiotic environment and the volcanic conditions that can drive chemical evolution toward the origin of life. The book is not exclusively Earth-centric, but instead considers whether life could begin elsewhere in our solar system. Deamer does not propose how life did begin, because we can never know that with certainty. Instead, his goal is to understand how life can begin on any habitable planet, with Earth so far being the only known example.
Book Synopsis Rising from the Plains by : John McPhee
Download or read book Rising from the Plains written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John McPhee continues his Annals of the Former World series about the geology of North America along the fortieth parallel with Rising from the Plains. This third volume presents another exciting geological excursion with an engaging account of life—past and present—in the high plains of Wyoming. Sometimes it is said of geologists that they reflect in their professional styles the sort of country in which they grew up. Nowhere could that be more true than in the life of a geologist born in the center of Wyoming and raised on an isolated ranch. This is the story of that ranch, soon after the turn of the twentieth century, and of David Love, the geologist who grew up there, at home with the composition of the high country in the way that someone growing up in a coastal harbor would be at home with the vagaries of the sea.
Book Synopsis Rough-Hewn Land by : Keith Heyer Meldahl
Download or read book Rough-Hewn Land written by Keith Heyer Meldahl and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rough-Hewn Land tells the geologic story of the American West--the story of its rocks, rivers, mountains, earthquakes, and mineral wealth, including gold. It tells it by taking you on a 1000-mile-long field trip across the rough side of the continent from the California coast to the Rocky Mountains. This book puts you on the outcrop, geologic hammer in hand, to explore the evidence for how the spectacular, rough-hewn lands of the West came to be. When North America broke free from Eurasia and Africa some 200 million years ago, it triggered a cascade of violent geologic events that shaped the West we see today. As the west-moving continent crunched across the seabed of the ancient Pacific, islands and assorted pieces of ocean floor collected against its prow to build California--and plant gold there too. Meanwhile, mountains squeezed upward from California to Colorado, and vast quantities of molten rock seeded the crust with precious metals while spewing volcanic fire across the land. Later, the land stretched like an accordion to form the washboard-like Basin and Range province and Great Basin within it, while California began to crackle along the San Andreas fault. Throughout the West today, a near-constant drumroll of earthquakes testifies to a world still reshaping itself in response to the ceaseless movements of the Earth's tectonic plates. Rough-Hewn Land weaves these stories into the human history of the West. As we follow the adventures of John C. Frémont, Mark Twain, the Donner party, and other historic characters, we see how geologic forces have shaped human experience, just as they direct the fate of the West today"--
Book Synopsis Pynchon's California by : Scott McClintock
Download or read book Pynchon's California written by Scott McClintock and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-11 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pynchon's California is the first book to examine Thomas Pynchon's use of California as a setting in his novels. Contributors explore such topics as the relationship of the "California novels" to Pynchon's more historical and encyclopedic works; the significance of California's beaches, deserts forests, freeways, and "hieroglyphic" suburban sprawl; the California-inspired noir tradition; and the surprising connections to be uncovered between drug use and realism, melodrama and real estate, private detection and the sacred."--P. 4 of cover.
Book Synopsis Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region by : Doris Sloan
Download or read book Geology of the San Francisco Bay Region written by Doris Sloan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-06-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You can't really know the place where you live until you know the shapes and origins of the land around you. To feel truly at home in the Bay Area, read Doris Sloan's intriguing stories of this region's spectacular, quirky landscapes."—Hal Gilliam, author of Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region "This is a fascinating look at some of the world's most complex and engaging geology. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in an understanding of the beautiful landscape and dynamic geology of the Bay Area."—Mel Erskine, geological consultant "This accessible summary of San Francisco Bay Area geology is particularly timely. We are living in an age where we must deal with our impact on our environment and the impact of the environment on us. Earthquake hazards, and to a lesser extent landslide hazards, are well known, but the public also needs to be aware of other important engineering and environmental impacts and geologic resources. This book will allow Bay Area residents to make more intelligent decisions about the geological issues affecting their lives."—John Wakabayashi, geological consultant
Book Synopsis Assembling the Architect by : George Barnett Johnston
Download or read book Assembling the Architect written by George Barnett Johnston and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assembling the Architect explores the origins and history of architectural practice. It unravels the competing interests that historically have structured the field and cultivates a deeper understanding of the contemporary profession. Focusing on the period 1870 to 1920 when the foundations were being laid for the U.S. architectural profession that we recognize today, this study traces the formation and standardization of the fundamental relationships among architects, owners, and builders, as codified in the American Institute of Architects' very first Handbook of Architectural Practice. It reveals how these archetypal roles have always been fluid, each successfully redefining their own agency with respect to the others in the constantly-shifting political economy of building. Far from being a purely historical study, the book also sheds light on today's digitally-enabled profession. Contemporary architectural tools and disciplinary ideals continue to be shaped by the same fundamental tensions, and emergent modes of practice such as BIM (Building Information Modelling) and IPD (Integrated Project Delivery) represent the realization of programs and agendas that have been over a century in play. Essential reading for professional practice courses as a contextual and historical companion to the Handbook, Assembling the Architect provides a critical perspective of the profession that is fundamental to understanding current architectural practice.
Download or read book In Suspect Terrain written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the outwash plains of Brooklyn to Indiana's drifted diamonds and gold, John McPhee's In Suspect Terrain is a narrative of the earth, told in four sections of equal length, each in a different way reflecting the three others-- a biography; a set piece about a fragment of Appalachian landscape in illuminating counterpoint to the human history there; a modern collision of ideas about the origins of the mountain range; and, in contrast, a century-old collision of ideas about the existence of the Ice Age. The central figure is Anita Harris, an internationally celebrated geologist who went into her profession to get out of a Brooklyn ghetto. The unifying theme is plate tectonics-- here concentrating on the acceptance that all aspects of the theory do not universally enjoy. As such, In Suspect Terrain is a report from the rough spots at the front edge of a science. In Suspect Terrain is the second book in a series on geology and geologists, presenting a cross section of North America along the fortieth parallel, and gathered under the overall title Annals of the Former World. The other books in the series are Basin and Range, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California.
Book Synopsis The Wintun Indians of California and Their Neighbors by : Peter M. Knudtson
Download or read book The Wintun Indians of California and Their Neighbors written by Peter M. Knudtson and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the reader with an accurate mental picture of Wintun tribal culture as it existed in prewhite times and during gold rush days.
Book Synopsis The Control of Nature by : John McPhee
Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Book Synopsis Abolition Geography by : Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Download or read book Abolition Geography written by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present. Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place. Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.
Book Synopsis Pests of the Native California Conifers by : David Wood
Download or read book Pests of the Native California Conifers written by David Wood and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-05-08 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This guide synthesizes the most current information available on the pests and environmental conditions that can damage California’s conifers, the vast majority of native trees in the state. Authoritative and easy-to-use, it is an essential reference for biologists, arborists, ecologists, foresters and everyone who needs up-to-date information on conifer pests in one convenient manual. o Species accounts cover life cycles, habits, distribution, and significance of each pest and discuss valuable options for reducing or avoiding damage o 111 clear color photographs show damage caused by 80 insects, diseases, fungi, parasitic plants, animals, and other destructive agents o The only guide to include information on environmental factors such as air pollution, salt, and frost as well as biological agents o Appendices list pests and diseases by tree species and by part of the tree affected
Download or read book Bedrock written by Lauret E. Savoy and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelists, poets, artists, anthropologists, traditional elders, philosophers, and naturalists come together to create a geological portrait of the Earth -- from the violence of earthquakes and erupting volcanoes to epochal patterns in stone and the sinuous flow of rivers. With insights from many cultures and across time, Bedrock wonderfully illuminates the geology of our home planet. The book is organized into sections that deal with rock and stone; deep time; earthquakes and faults; volcanoes and eruptions; rivers to the sea; mountains and high�lands; wind and desert; the flow of ice; and the life of the Earth. Insightful, penetrating, and provocative, the works are written from many positions -- traditional and indigenous as well as Western scientific. Bedrock bridges specialized science and ordinary existence, providing a fascinating portrait of the forces that have shaped the Earth and giving readers a sense of the geologic experience encompassing their lives.
Book Synopsis A People's Guide to Orange County by : Elaine Lewinnek
Download or read book A People's Guide to Orange County written by Elaine Lewinnek and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At first encounter, Orange County can resemble the incoherent sprawl that geographer James Howard Kunstler named The Geography of Nowhere: a car-dependent, seemingly bland space designed most of all for efficient capitalist consumption. But it is somewhere, too, and learning its stories helps it become more than its boosters' slogans. Writers Lisa Alvarez and Andrew Tonkovich, residents of Orange County's remote Modjeska Canyon, describe this whole county as "a much-constructed and -contrived locale, a pestered and paved landscape built and borne upon stories of human development... of destruction as well as, happily, of enduring wild places." In a similar vein, essayist D. J. Waldie, chronicler of the bordering suburb of Lakewood, asserts that "becoming Californian ... means locating yourself" in "habitats of memory" that connect ordinary, local areas with broader themes. Moving beyond sentimentality, nostalgia, and so many sales pitches that omit far too much, Waldie echoes Michel de Certeau's call to "awaken the stories that sleep in the streets." That is the goal of this book. Inspired by Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng's A People's Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012), as well as the People's Guides to Boston and San Francisco that have followed it, we offer this guidebook for locals, tourists, students, and everyone who wants to understand where they really are. This book is organized with regional chapters, sorted roughly north to south by community. Within each city, sites are listed alphabetically. After the group of entries for each city, we recommend nearby restaurants as well as other sites of interest for visitors. Readers may explore this book geographically or use the thematic tours in the appendix to consider environmental politics, Cold War legacies, the politics of housing, LGBTQ spaces, or Orange County's carceral state. The appendix also contains suggestions for teachers using this book, engaging students in cognitive mapping, close reading, popular-culture analysis, and creating additional entries of people's history. While many local histories tend to focus on a few white settlers, this book places attention on the people, especially the subaltern ones who are hierarchically under others, including workers, people of color, youth, and LGBTQ individuals. No single book can represent an entire county, so we have chosen to concentrate on the lesser-known power struggles that have happened here and influenced the landscape that we all share. We could not include everyone, of course. We are mindful that other groups are currently creating more people's history on this landscape that we hope our readers will continue to explore. In Orange County, excavating the diverse past can be frowned upon or actively repressed by those invested in selling Orange County in the style of its booster Anglo settlers from 150 years ago. This book tells the diverse political history beyond the bucolic imagery of orange-crate labels. We hope it will inspire readers to further explore Orange County and reflect on even more sites that could be included in the ordinary, extraordinary landscape here"--
