Imagine Pixar animating the Planet Earth’s crustal movements from the Permian Age of 225 million years ago, when all the land above water was an amalgamated whole, through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous ages’ land mass chess moves, to now. With that many millions of years telescoped into an hour’s time, we would be voyeurs to the 3-D gyrations of mass, volcanic eruptions, uplift and drift, as seabed becomes Himalaya in continental collisions. Stunning. This book comes close to that imagined movie, with graphics which explain the unimaginable, and with photographs of the remains of undeniable major earth shifts. In California, the San Andreas, running lengthwise for hundreds of miles, is the North American and the Pacific plates’ interface. It looks as though we live on the equivalent of an ancient elephant knee: bulbous, creviced, its rhythmic movement often interrupted by unpredictable jerks and twitches. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999. 118 pp,