John McPhee’s five-book Annals of the Former World tracks the author’s geologic journey across the United States, at the fortieth parallel, on Interstate 80, using the highway’s exposed rock “roadcuts” to peek into North America’s geologic past. McPhee’s trip was broken into five books, corresponding to the five geologists who toured him through their areas of expertise. The first, Basin and Range, covers Nevada and Utah.
For the second book of the series, In Suspect Terrain, McPhee examines Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Manhattan—where I-80 begins—and Brooklyn, where Anita Harris began. Anita Harris (née Fishman, son of Harry Fishman, née Hershel Litvak) grew up in cramped Jewish Brooklyn. She became a geologist to escape Brooklyn’s confines, after she discovered she could get paid “for walking around in mountains.”
