Andrew Alden: Deep Oakland, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Blurb

Now in paperback: This San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and California Book Award finalist drills down into Oakland's geological history and its impacts on the city's urban present.

"This book has turned me into a newcomer to my own city, but has also changed the way I will view any landscape. I can think of few greater gifts than that."---Jenny Odell , author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time

"Spending time with Andrew Alden is like giving yourself x-ray eyes." ---Roman Mars , host and creator of 99% Invisible

Beneath Oakland's streets and underfoot of every scurrying creature atop them, rocks roil, shift, crash, and collide in an ever-churning seismological saga. In Deep Oakland , geologist Andrew Alden excavates the ancient story of Oakland's geologic underbelly and reveals how its silt, soil, and subterranean sinews are intimately entwined with its human history---and future. Poised atop a world-famous fault line now slumbering, Alden charts how these quaking rocks gave rise to the hills and the flats; how ice-age sand dunes gave root to the city's eponymous oak forests; how the Jurassic volcanoes of Leona Heights gave way to mining boom times; how Lake Merritt has swelled and disappeared a dozen times over the course of its million-year lifespan; and how each epochal shift has created the terrain cradling Oaklanders today. With Alden as our guide---and with illustrations by Laura Cunningham, author of A State of Change---we see that just as Oakland is a human crossroads, a convergence of cultures from the world over, so too is the bedrock below, carried here from parts still incompletely known.