McPhee spent twenty years riding shotgun with geologists up and down Interstate 80, pulling over at roadcuts, and this is all four books plus a fifth chunk stacked into one. It won the Pulitzer in 1999. He starts in Jersey with Ken Deffeyes and heads west. Nevada, where the whole basin and range is quietly pulling itself apart. Wyoming with Dave Love, a rancher’s kid turned geologist who knew that country the way you know your own yard. California, which isn’t really California at all but a pile of junk that drifted in and stuck. Then the old, cold rock under the Midwest that hasn’t done much of anything in a billion years. Each book is really one geologist thinking out loud while McPhee keeps up. And here’s what it does to you: You can’t drive past a roadcut afterward without wanting to stop. That wall of rock beside the shoulder was a seafloor, a desert, a range taller than the Himalaya, and it’s all sitting right there in layers if you know how to look.