Synopses & Reviews
This second volume of
The John McPhee Reader includes material from his eleven books published since 1975, including
Coming into the Country, Looking for a Ship, The Control of Nature, and the four books on geology that comprise
Annals of the Former World.
Review
"McPhee's work has the quality of permanence . . . Over the years, McPhee's writing, on all subjects, has evolved. His characters and narrative structures are more complicated and surprising. He is looser, funnier, and, at the same time, his engagement with the physical world and moral problems consistently deepens . . . A book like this Reader should provide the flavor of this more ambitious phase of McPhee's career, its radiant maturity. The pieces and excerpts gathered here show off a writer who not only is in absolute command of his craft—his sentences, his structures, his sense of humor—but also revels in the pleasures of a fragile world and makes sure we take note."—from the Introduction by David Remnick
"As an example for writers John McPhee remains without peer. To our good fortune he revels in a universe full of things to understand, and there is nobody better at sharing that joy with his readers."—Christopher Shaw, The Washington Post Book World
"Mr. McPhee has created a style—blending detailed reporting with a novelistic sense of narrative—and a standard that have influenced a whole generation of journalists."—Timothy Bay, The Baltimore Sun
"John McPhee is our best and liveliest writer about the earth and earth sciences. He overspreads his territory like an ice sheet, and yet his touch is light. He can distribute silt and sand deftly as he wears down mountains."—Wallace Stegner, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Synopsis
This second volume of
The John McPhee Reader includes material from his eleven books published since 1975, including
Coming into the Country, Looking for a Ship, The Control of Nature, and the four books on geology that comprise
Annals of the Former World.
About the Author
John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at
Time magazine and led to his long association with
The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book,
A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including
Oranges (1967),
Coming into the Country (1977),
The Control of Nature (1989),
The Founding Fish (2002),
Uncommon Carriers (2007), and
Silk Parachute (2011).
Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and
The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Table of Contents
[With the exception of "Under the Snow," which is here in its entirety, all titles are represented by excerpts.]
Introduction
from Giving Good Weight (A Collection)
"Giving Good Weight"
"Brigade de Cuisine"
from Basin and Range
from In Suspect Terrain
from La Place de la Concorde Suisse
from Table of Contents (A Collection)
"Under the Snow"
"Heirs of General Practice"
"North of the C. P. Line"
from Rising from the Plains
from The Control of Nature
from Looking for a Ship
from Assembling California
from The Ransom of Russian Art