Now in paperback: This San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and California Book Award finalist drills down into Oakland’s geological history and its impacts on the city’s urban present.

Beneath Oakland’s streets and underfoot of every scurrying creature atop them, rocks roil, shift, crash, and collide in an ever-churning seismological saga. In Deep Oakland, geologist Andrew Alden excavates the ancient story of Oakland’s geologic underbelly and reveals how its silt, soil, and subterranean sinews are intimately entwined with its human history—and future. Poised atop a world-famous fault line now slumbering, Alden charts how these quaking rocks gave rise to the hills and the flats; how ice-age sand dunes gave root to the city’s eponymous oak forests; how the Jurassic volcanoes of Leona Heights gave way to mining boom times; how Lake Merritt has swelled and disappeared a dozen times over the course of its million-year lifespan; and how each epochal shift has created the terrain cradling Oaklanders today. With Alden as our guide—and with illustrations by Laura Cunningham, author of A State of Change—we see that just as Oakland is a human crossroads, a convergence of cultures from the world over, so too is the bedrock below, carried here from parts still incompletely known.