Basin and Range (inscribed association copy)
NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981. First edition. Hardcover. An association copy, inscribed on the half-title page: "for Judy and Bob Belous, who do not need a geologist to tel them where to find exotic terrain. best always, John McPhee." Uncommon signed. Robert Belous was a friend McPhee made in Alaska as he wrote Coming into the Country, thus the inscription refers to the stunning landscape of Alaska. Belous was an important figure with the National Park Service there in the run up to the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which Jimmy Carter signed into law in 1980, more than doubling the size of the National Park System. Belous began his career as a freelance wildlife photographer based in Jackson Hole, where he befriended and worked with wilderness leader and icon Margaret Murie. His association with her and the wilderness movement soon tipped him toward Alaska. He joined the NPS’s Alaska Task Force in 1972 first as a photographer, then became the “keyman” for the planning of the Cape Krusenstern and Kobuk Valley areas (eventually a National Monument and National Park, respectively, totaling more than 2 million acres), and in 1975 began serving as the Alaska Task Force’s public programs and liason officer. In essence, he had an important and varied hand in the preservation of Alaskan lands. See this tribute for more about his career and influence. As liason officer for the NPS in Alaska, he would have been a key source and guide for McPhee in the writing of Coming into the Country, which was published in 1977 amid (and about) the push for the ANILCA. They remained friends over the years (as other inscriptions attest), visiting each other. Belous later worked in Redwood National Parks before ending his career as the superintendent of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in Louisiana. This is the first of McPhee's geology quartet that ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize repackaged as Annals of a Former World. Beige paper boards with a black cloth spine. A fine copy in a very good jacket with wear to top edge, including a couple short tears, and sunning to spine.. Fine. Item #2160
ISBN: 0374109141
More about the book:
"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."
Price: $475.00 save 5% $451.25