Book excerpt: "The American Cordilleras form a continuous orogen that extends for 12,500 km along the eastern flank of the Pacific Ocean from Arctic to Antarctic latitudes as an integral part of the circum-Pacific orogenic belt. Following two summary chapters on the overall anatomy and evolution of North and South American segments of the orogenic system, this volume includes ten seminal chapters dealing with salient aspects of the key geodynamic processes that have accompanied Cordilleran geotectonic evolution: forearc terrane accretion, arc magmatism, shallow subduction, and backarc intracontinental deformation. The papers in this volume were selected from those presented at the 2006 Backbone of the Americas Meeting, which was sponsored jointly by multiple North and South American geological societies in Mendoza, Argentina."--pub. desc.