The Second John McPhee Reader

by John McPhee

Other authorsDavid Remnick (Introduction)

Paperback, 1996

Status

Available

Call number

081

Genres

General Nonfiction

All Topics

Nonfiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1996), Paperback, 416 pages

Description

For a person who has not encountered John McPhee's lively writing, The Second John McPhee Reader is the perfect introduction. McPhee, author of Coming Into the Country, and Assembling California punctuates his delightful prose with a sharp sense of humor and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice. Whether he's working for a farmer in the Greenmarkets in Harlem, Brooklyn or the Upper East Side in Giving Good Weight, or trekking through Switzerland in La Place de la Concorde Suisse, McPhee gives the listener an intimate and provocative glimpse of the physical landscape and the people who are shaped by it. This Reader showcases a writer who not only is in absolute command of his craft, but also who revels in the pleasures of a fragile world. Narrator Nelson Runger's gravelly voice powerfully conveys McPhee's understated writing. Intriguing and thought-provoking, this audiobook is a must-listen for anyone interested in the natural or human worlds.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member jjmcgaffey

An assortment of essays drawn from his books (which, I think, are drawn from his columns). The subjects cover Alaska and its inhabitants, a guy who is also named John McPhee, the geology of California, more general geology of the US with a focus on the 'basin and range' region of Nevada and that

area, a guy who collected unofficial (=dissident) Russian art...among other things. Many bits are very interesting - I got one of his geology books (Basin and Range) from the library and enjoyed it a lot. Other bits seem rather pointless to me. I enjoyed his discussion of the geology of the California gold rush a lot more than I did the subsequent history of the gold rush. This is partly because the history is made up of vignettes about dozens of people - there's no depth to it. Why did the envoy bring the gold to the army? Who _was_ the envoy, and was he acting on his own or under orders? If Sutter wanted his lease, showing the gold seems unwise. The most interesting parts were a)that the railroads had to buy their land and secure it quickly or it would have been washed and mined away; and b) that in the mid-eighteen hundreds they were using powerful hydraulic jets to mine with. I wish McPhee had gone into more detail about how those worked. I've been reading the book for long enough I've lost most of the details of the first essays, but in general - McPhee's style is quite choppy and tends to skim over subjects. I find this quite sufficient for geology. but his people stories seem to me to waver from obsessive (to the point of being boring) detail to a bare skim over the surface, leaving me puzzled more often than not. I don't love McPhee's writing overall, but his good pieces (that is. the ones I find interesting) are fascinating. I'm going to hunt up his other geology books too.

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