Harry R. Schwartz

I just finished reading John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World. It’s a lovely geological romp across the country (and across about twenty years—McPhee is a dedicated researcher), detailing the history of the continent along I-80.

Near the tail end, in the section on assembling California¹, McPhee offhandedly mentions another book:

Not just any city is the topic of a serious tourist guidebook called A Streetcar to Subduction, a copy of which Moores and I have with us. Written by the geomorphologist Clyde Wahrhaftig, of Berkeley, it is a shining little book of geological field trips on public transportation.

This sounds amazing. I wanna go on a geological tour of SF! That sounds way more fun than all that tech startup nonsense.

And apparently I’m not the only one—Amazon lists A Streetcar to Subduction as the “#1 Best Seller in Plate Tectonics.” I wasn’t aware that that category existed, but I was delighted to find it.