Fieldwork: A Geologist's Memoir of the Kalahari

Description

Christopher Scholz, an internationally recognized expert in the geological fields of seismology and tectonics, here offers a captivating memoir of a three-month-long field expedition to northern Botswana. Fieldwork tracks the adventures of a group of American scientists trying to gather critical data in some of the wildest and most inhospitable par

"Fieldwork tells a truly engrossing story. It is a great yarn... told with an eye for the interesting detail and a flair for narrative... As Scholz says, 'Some things in life are worth doing solely for the experience.' The same thing could be said about reading this book."--James Trefil, The New York Times Book Review "Few earth scientists write anything in the style of their life's memoirs, so this book is doubly welcome. It should appeal to a wide variety of readers, whether fieldworkers or not. The science is accessibly laid out and richly embroidered with tales of the bush."--Keith Cox, Nature "A gripping account of a small research program directed at understanding how continents rift apart... A thrilling read."--Rob Butler, The New Scientist "Had Raymond Chandler written of a geologist searching for a 'lost' African rift valley, [Fieldwork] might have been the result... I read it at one sitting, with an image of the late Robert Mitchum as he might have been in the film version... "--Anthony Sinclair, Antiquity "[T]his book is doubly welcome. It should appeal to a wide variety of readers, whether fieldworkers or not. The science is accessibly laid out and richly embroidered with tales of the bush... Although much of the book is devoted to the sheer joy of life in the bush (and its perils), and is written so that you can almost smell the smoke of the campfire, the descriptions of occasional trips to town are just as evocative of Africa. We meet a rich array of ramshackle bars with ramshackle customers, we play plenty of darts and hear many a comic or curious yarn."--Nature "A refreshing and easy description of science at the blunter end... You can feel [Scholz's] quiet thrill as he stands on a hillock which, he thinks, lies above the very tip of a continental rift creeping through Botswana."--The Economist