Assembled together in Annals of the Former World are no fewer than four of John McPhee's acclaimed popular books about North American geology — Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, Assembling California — as well as the previously unpublished Crossing the Craton. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Stephen Jay Gould praised McPhee's "ability to capture the essence of a complex issue ...

Is the 250-million-year career of a rock a suitable subject for a picture book aimed at kindergarteners through third-graders? Yes! Writes the reviewer for The Children's Bookwatch, "Marianne Wallace's artwork is nothing short of spectacular. Diane Spickert's narrative text is absolutely faithful to the geology and paleontology of the Earth's record as recorded by fossils.

In The Map that Changed the World, Simon Winchester tells the practically Dickensian story of William Smith and his struggle to create what was arguably the first true geological map. Winchester writes, "Geology, it seems almost redundant to say, underlies and underpins everything: the site of every city, every gold mine, every field, every island is determined purely by geology — and humanity's condition is more directly influenced by geology than by any other aspect of the natural world.

From the publisher: "a widely acclaimed account of the most celebrated controversies in the history of geology — a book that covers many of the most important ideas that have emerged since the birth of the science. Among the great debates described here are those involving catastrophe theory, uniformitarianism, the discovery of the Ice Age, speculation concerning the age of the earth, and the advent of new ideas on plate tectonics and continental drift. In presenting these key topics, the author opens the fascinating history of geology to a wide audience.