The Geo’s Pick: Tales True & Tall
Natural History Travel Writing Australian Biography Earth Sciences Adventure Non-Fiction Popular Science Geology Memoir
The Geo’s Pick: Tales True & Tall is the hardcover memoir every rock-lover, map-nerd and weekend adventurer wishes they’d written. In 226 colour-illustrated pages, Australian geologist Max de Vietri swaps technical jargon for campfire storytelling, recounting the field trips, misadventures and eureka moments that shaped a forty-year career hunting ore bodies from the Tanami Desert to the tip of Cape York. Each chapter is a self-contained yarn—some side-splitting, some heart-stopping—all of them grounded in real geology and real country. The result reads like Bill Bryson with a rock hammer: equal parts science, history and bush philosophy, delivered with the laconic humour Australians do best.
What makes this first-edition hardcover special is the way it bridges worlds. Professional geologists will recognise the core trays, acid bottles and helicopter “sardine tins” that dominate their working lives, while newcomers get a jargon-free primer on how minerals form, why faults matter and what “the geo’s pick” actually feels like when it clangs off a brand-new discovery. De Vietri’s water-colour sketches and on-site photographs—many taken at shoulder height from the bottom of drill rigs—put you inside the scruffy boots of a working geologist better than any textbook ever could. The book is also a love letter to the Australian landscape: red dirt that stains everything forever, rock stacks that hide 2-billion-year-old secrets, and the sudden green “breakaway” that signals water in the middle of nowhere.
Collectors value The Geo’s Pick because it was printed in small numbers in 2020 and never re-issued in hardcover; most copies went straight to university libraries or field camps, so clean first editions are scarce. This copy is tight, square and very lightly thumbed—ideal for gifting to a student heading off on their first mapping season, or for slipping into a day-pack as inspiration when your own compass needle starts to spin. Whether you’re chasing minerals, memories or just a cracking good true story, this is the pick you want in your kit.
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