A review by bradherring
In Suspect Terrain by John McPhee

4.0

It's fascinating, John McPhee's elegant writing in the service of profiling a mind as violently closed as Anita Harris'. The defense I've seen of her Luddite position that plate tectonics did not cause the Appalachian orogeny is that it's important to be skeptical. No argument there! But she is so extraordinarily dismissive of the idea, pointing to "data" that "the plate tectonic boys" supposedly ignore (what data? just conodonts?!), while presenting literally none of her own. There's an intellectual curiosity one needs to be a great scientist, a sort of Buddhist beginner's mind, paired with a hearty hunk of humility, and Harris possessed none of that. My interpretation, and the reason I'm giving this 4 stars instead of 2, is that the entire book is a savage but extremely subtle destruction of her. McPhee ends the book with a lengthy aside of how the great Ice Age theorist Agassiz was pissily dismissive of the then-new wave of science proffered by Charles Darwin right before wrapping things up with Harris echoing those same talking points against the plate tectonic theory. Of course almost 40 additional years of scientific progress has demonstrated how foolish Harris' strident "get off my lawn" attitude was.