Prompted by the death of my Amazon Kindle, I uncovered a very interesting book at the local public library: Devil in the Mountain: A Search for the Origin of the Andes
The author, a geologist, chronicles his ten years of arduous field work on the Bolivian Altiplano trying to figure out “How come these mountains are so high?” and “How come these mountains sprang up so relatively recently?” (towards the end of the book it turns out that the answer has to do with the cooling that the Earth has experienced since the age of the dinosaurs)
This would have been a terrible book for the Kindle anyway, as the drawings are excellent and essential to understanding the material.