Peter Macinnis

Mistaken for Granite Peter Macinnis

This is a book for people who wonder why rocks are as they are. Here, among other everyday things, you will find tales of wells that go (slightly) uphill; rivers that flow underground; ancient recycling; rotten rocks; pretty rocks; how and when rocks were made; waves and beaches; rocks that float, fall, bounce, bend and tip over; asteroids; hoodoos; Liesegang rings; falling things and weighing the planet; plate tectonics; crystals; lightning as a destroyer of rocks; glaciers; mud; sand dunes; caves; tombs; soil; and where to find a fortune in gold. Those are the stories the rocks can tell, if you know how to read them. The rocks won't tell you (but this book does) about poets, playwrights and plagiarists; mad (maybe) and devious (certainly) scientists; altitude sickness; ringing bells in Boston; walking on and inside volcanoes; elephants in stiletto heels; golf in space; rocks in exotic locations; a tourist authority conspiracy; a quiz show that got it wrong; the art of making aqueducts; finding water in a desert; poison wells; fat strippers and oil wells; hot spots; fake fossils; pretending to be a wizard in Coimbra in Portugal (where the undergraduates wear Harry Potter cloaks); how (and why) the author smuggled a fossil; stone fortifications, monuments, bridges and buildings; rock inscriptions and art, and what they tell us; behaving oddly in art galleries; mapping the planet's surface and interior; gravity and finding exoplanets; telling the truth about cholera and lies about SARS; why climate matters and how we (and the world) will probably end, possibly sooner than we think. There are also brief references to dragons and pixies, but only in a soundly geological context. This e-book version has colour photos, and detailed internal navigation: the paperback has a nice solid feel to it, no internal navigation, and half-tone illustrations. Books are like that!