John McPhee

Silk Parachute

2010

I'll admit I haven't read Silk Parachute yet since my book-buying budget is by necessity nearly non-existent these days. I look forward to reading it before too long, I hope. Here's what a few others have had to say about it.

"This is not a new McPhee reader, though surely a third such volume is merited, but rather a collection of the best of his funny and affecting personal essays, works that offer glimpses of McPhee as a willful, curious boy; a nervous rookie New Yorker staff writer; and a bemused and proud father and grandfather. The stellar title essay is a glorious curveball homage to his mother. McPhee also writes of canoeing and lacrosse." - Booklist

"We marvel at the pains [McPhee] takes with structure, approaching his subject from oblique angles, slowly building tension, sometimes seeming to wander, but always propelling his narratives forward . . . In the age of blogging and tweeting, of writers' near-constant self-promotion, McPhee is an imperative counterweight, a paragon of both sense and civility." -Elizabeth Royte, The New York Times Book Review

"Reading McPhee's lucid descriptions of [lacrosse], with its lightning pace and nuanced skill levels, one wonders why Americans spend so much time watching football . . . We're fortunate McPhee has written as much-and as well-as he has. For readers who have always wanted a more personal glimpse, Silk Parachute should be floating your way." -Tim McNulty, The Seattle Times

"How long the McPhee tradition will endure is anyone's guess. But for now we have Silk Parachute, a testament to a kind of literary journalism that will, with any luck, have both its standards and its standard-bearer around for years to come." -Danny Heitman, The Christian Science Monitor

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Note: The rest of John McPhee's books are listed in the order they were first published.

A Sense of Where You Are

Bill Bradley at Princeton - 1965

Long before he was a United States Senator and presidential candidate, Bill Bradley left Missouri to attend Princeton University, where he played basketball. He played the game extraordinarily well and attracted the attention of an extraordinary writer of nonfiction. Bradley's precise, graceful, and seemingly effortless moves are recorded here by McPhee, whose writings have the same qualities.

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The Headmaster

Frank L. Boyden, of Deerfield - 1966

Frank L. Boyden came to Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1902 at the age of 22 to become headmaster of Deerfield Academy, which had an enrollment of 14. Sixty-six years later, when he left that post, Deerfield Academy was on a level with Andover and Exeter.

The Headmaster is a record of a lifetime's striving to create perfection--a striving conducted with zest, vision, humor and an unbelievable capacity for work. - John McKey, The Boston Globe

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Oranges

1967

McPhee originally planned to do a magazine article about oranges, but he kept coming in contact with more and more fascinating information about Florida's best-known crop. He traces the history of oranges, which originated in Southeast Asia, fascinated European monarchs, and came to the New World with Columbus. He reveals the strangeness of the fruit - most oranges in Florida, for instance, are grown on lemon roots. In his review in Harper's, Roderick Cook called Oranges "a delicious book, in a word, and more absorbing than many a novel."

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The Pine Barrens

1968

While many people think of New Jersey as little more than a place to put industry and bedroom communities for New York and Philadelphia, some are aware of the sparsely settled Pine Barrens in the center and south parts of the state. McPhee "tells how this geographic anomaly has come to be, describes its people and their distinctive folklore, and captures something of the dreamlike quality of this incredibly quiet land in the midst of the noisy clutter of mechanical civilization" (Kansas City Star).

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A Roomful of Hovings

and Other Profiles - 1968

McPhee is a recognized master of the art of painting portraits with words, and in this book he presents five examples. He writes of Thomas P.F. Hoving, an art historian; Euell Gibbons, author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus; Carroll Brewster of a team of M.I.T. Fellows in Africa in the Sudan; Robert Twynan, who makes the greens of Wimbledon the best in the world; and Temple Fielding, author of popular travel guides to Europe.

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Levels of the Game

1969

The book begins with the ball rising into the air at the start of a tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clarke Graebner. Ashe, the first African American ever selected for the United States Davis Cup team, was ranked the number one tennis player in 1968 (and later in 1975, the year he won Wimbledon). Graebner was a fellow member of the 1968 Davis Cup team, and won the US Men's Clay Court singles Championship that year. The game is a semi-final match of the US Open at Forest Hills, New York. In addition to a brilliant stroke-by-stroke account of the game, McPhee also examines each player's background and attitudes that have helped shape their games.

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The Crofter and the Laird

1970

John McPhee's ancestors came from the island of Colonsay, twenty-five miles off the Scottish mainland in the Hebridies. The island was one of the last surviving domains of the feudal system, owned by the laird, the fourth Baron Strathcona, who lived most of the year in Bath and appeared on the island mostly in Summer. The crofter, Donald McNeill, was one of 80 of the island's 138 residents who could trace through his ancestors an unbroken residence on the island of two to three hundred years. McPhee gives us evocative portraits of the island, the islanders, and the laird.

This is the cover of the UK edition. It really captures the spirit of the island.

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Encounters with the Archdruid

1971

The Archdruid of the title is David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club, and a founder of Friends of the Eart and Earth Island Institute. McPhee went on three different wilderness journeys with Brower, each one including a man representing the pro-development side of the debate on the environment. They hike in the Cascades of Washington with Charles Park, a geologist and mining engineer who, McPhee relates, would want the White House moved if copper were to be found under it. They visit Hilton Head Island on the coast of South Carolina with Charles Fraser, who seeks to develop the island. In the final section, they join Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy in a rafting trip down the Colorado River. Dominy is an ardent proponent of dams, Brower is equally ardent in his opposition to them. McPhee skillfully weaves the stories of the journeys with the stories of the four men's lives.
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The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

1973

McPhee relates the story of the development and testing of a revolutionary type of aircraft, the Aereon, envisioned to be part airplane, part airship in the shape of a huge pumpkin seed. After twelve years of development and fundraising, it is ready to leave the ground. The book also tells the story of William Miller, minister of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Trenton, New Jersey, who initiated the project. The Aereon did take off, but the concept did not. More than thirty years after the book's publication, Aereon Corporation is still around with concepts for military designs.

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The Curve of Binding Energy

A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor - 1974

McPhee presents the story of Theodore B. "Ted" Taylor, a nuclear theoretical physicist who has designed some of the smallest and largest nuclear bombs. Later, he became very concerned that weapons-grade nuclear materials might get into the wrong hands to build a homemade bomb, and it wouldn't be as difficult as many people thought.

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Pieces of the Frame

1975

This is a collection of articles that appeared in several magazines, mostly The New Yorker, between 1963 and 1975. The oldest, "Basketball and Beefeaters," is about his experiences playing basketball while he was a student of English Literature in England, experience which served him well when he later wrote A Sense of You Are, his first book. "The Search for Marvin Gardens" opens by contrasting a Monopoly game with the stark reality of the run-down streets in Atlantic City that bear the names of the colored spaces of the game. In "Ruidoso" McPhee tells of a mid-50s quarter-horse breeder from Arkansas who travels to New Mexico with three horses to race at the track known as the quarter-horse capital of the world. If you want to get a sense of where you are in relation to John McPhee and his writing, this collection of early pieces wouldn't be a bad place to start. Edward Hoagland of The New York Times writes of him, "One has the sense always with McPhee of a man at a pitch of pleasure in his work, a natural at it, finding out on behalf of the rest of us how some portion of the world works."

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The Survival of the Bark Canoe

1975

As a teenager, Henri Vaillancourt of Greenville, New Hampshire, became interested in Indian lore and especially in their canoes. There were no canoes in town, so using a not-very-detailed article from a magazine, he built a bark canoe. While still in his teens, he was told about The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, then available from the Government Printing Office. It became his guide in his quest to build the perfect bark canoe. McPhee joins Vaillancourt on a trip on the rivers and lakes of Maine's northern woods with three other people and two bark canoes.

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The John McPhee Reader

This volume collects selections from McPhee's first twelve books, chosen by editor William L. Howarth in consultation with the author. Each piece, taken from a longer work, nonetheless stands on its own. It provides a great introduction to McPhee and his works. Howarth also includes a listing of all of McPhee's published from 1960 to 1976 plus an introduction that outlines the author's career.

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Coming into the Country

1977

Alaska, the nation's largest state, is the subject of McPhee's largest book outside of Annals of the Former World, which is a combination of four earlier books. It is divided into three sections dealing with wilderness, urban Alaska, and life in the bush. He explores the land, the animals, and most of all, the people who live in Alaska. Benjamin de Mott in The Atlantic Monthly writes, "What is really in view in Coming into the Country is a matter not usually met in works of reportage . . . nothing less than the nature of the human condition."

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Giving Good Weight

1979

The title of the book is also the title of the first of five pieces written between 1975 and 1979. McPhee goes to work for an Upstate New York farmer who sells his produce in the Greenmarkets of New York City, and later becomes a seller of peppers in Harlem and Brooklyn. "The Atlantic Generating Station" is about a proposed plan to build floating nuclear power plants that would be anchored in the ocean. In "The Pinball Philosophy," McPhee writes about a shootout match between J. Anthony Lukas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning freelance writer, and Tom Buckley of The New York Times. In addition to their writing skills, the two men were, at the time, the top pinball players in New York City. "The Keel of Lake Dickey" is the story of a trip down the wild St. John River in northern Maine that ends at the site of a proposed but never built dam. The last and longest story, "Brigade de Cuisine," is the story of an extraordinary chef, "Otto" and his wife, "Anne," who prefer to remain anonymous so the master's works will be better known than his name.

I ran into "Anne" in 2008 in an online forum unrelated to food. She and "Otto" are retired now. She told me 1979, when John McPhee wrote "Brigade de Cuisine," was their peak year. Not long after, they moved to a smaller location for a few years.

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Basin and Range

1981

In the first of four books that were later collected into the 1999 Pulizter Prize-winning Annals of the Former World, McPhee travels along Interstate 80 with Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a professor of geology. This segment of the journey along that route is in Utah and Nevada, where range after range of mountains rise above valleys where the streams and rivers never reach the sea. With the author, we travel not only through the present-day landscape, but travel deep in time through millions of years to see how the landscape came to be in its present form. A reviewer in Geotimes wrote, "One result of the trip west is an introduction to plate tectonics-probably the most readable summary extant. Geologists will find it sound, others will find it understandable and illuminating."

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In Suspect Terrain

1983

The second book in McPhee's series on geology begins in the outwash plains of Brooklyn with geologist Anita Harris, herself from Brooklyn, and continues on into Indiana. Along the way, we learn more about plate tectonics and how geologists and other scientists are continually questioning and probing the theory, which only 50 years before had been dismissed as fanciful.

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La Place de la Concorde Suisse

1984

Switzerland, a country twice the size of New Jersey but with a smaller population, has an army of 650,000, most of whom, at any given time, are going about their civilian lives. Yet they can be mobilized in less than 48 hours. On a per capita basis, it is one of the largest armies in the world, and has kept Switzerland out of wars for about 500 years. With his usual elegance and insight, McPhee gives us a portrait of the mountainous country seen within the frame of its militia.

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Table of Contents

1985

This book consists of eight pieces written between 1981 and 1984, beginning with a short one about bear cubs, continuing with a longer one about bears in New Jersey, and includes a profile of Bill Bradley, subject of McPhee's first book and now a senator, and concludes with a piece about a warden in the northern Maine woods who is a pilot, a writer, and also named John McPhee. Also included is "Heirs of General Practice," which was later published as a separate book.

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Rising from the Plains

1986

In his third book of Annals of the Former World, Mcphee gives us a look at Wyoming, from the distant past to the present, and tells us of geologist David Love, who grew up on an isolated ranch in the center of the state. The book is as much about the human history of the area as it is about its geology.

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Heirs of General Practice

1986

Bucking the trend toward ever-increasing specialization in medicine, some young people who wanted to be doctors chose the "specialty" of family practice in the 1970s. McPhee writes of several young doctors in rural Maine who chose this route, following in the footsteps of generations of country doctors and advocating preventive as well as curative medicine.

"John McPhee's piece is a sensitive portrayal of the heart of family medicine-the personal relationships between family physicians, their patients and families-and an accurate representation of the special challenges of family practice and the reasons for its recent renaissance." -John P. Geyman, M.D., chairman, Department of Family Medicine, University of Washington and editor, Journal of Family Practice

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The Control of Nature

1989

Three separate stories are presented in which Man attempts mastery over Nature. In "Atchafalaya," McPhee tells of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' war against the lower Mississippi River. The river, if left to itself, would probably have switched courses by now, with its main flow down the Atchafalaya River, leaving New Orleans and Baton Rouge on silted-up backwaters. In Iceland, lava threatening the town of Heimaey on the island of Vestmannaeyjar is cooled with firehoses to keep the important fishing port from being engulfed. And in the Los Angeles area, an extensive system of dams and channels help keep people safe from flash floods of water, mud, and rocks. As usual in McPhee's works, we learn much of the character of the people involved in these battles.

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Looking for a Ship

1990

In the late 1980s, with the United States Merchant Marine having shrunk from two thousand ships to only four hundred over ten years, Andy Chase is looking for a ship. McPhee accompanies him on this search. Chase finds work as second mate aboard the S.S. Stella Lykes, captained by Paul McHenry Washburn. They embark on a forty-two day run down the Pacific Coast of South America, stopping at several ports to load and unload, while being on the lookout for modern day pirates. Richard F. Shepard in The New York Times writes, "Style is what McPhee is loaded down to the Plimsoll marks in felicitous phrases, keen observation, the knack of unloading a cargo of information without hitting the reader on the head with a jumbo boom."

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Assembling California

1993

In the fourth volume of Annals of the Former World, the intertwining of stories from the ancient past and the past measured in terms of human history continues. Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis is McPhee's guide as they examine the evidence of how California came together, starting at the Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada range and moving through the foothills, across the Central Valley to the Coast Ranges and the San Andreas fault. Moores and McPhee also travel to remote mountains in Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where events similar to those that shaped and continue to shape California are found.

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The Second John McPhee Reader

1996

There are eleven pieces to this volume, covering books McPhee has written since 1975, beginning with Coming into the Country and continuing through Assembling California. In his introduction, David Remmick writes, "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."

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Irons in the Fire

1997

This is another collection of McPhee's shorter work that has appeared in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. It opens with a piece about a brand inspector in Nevada, where cattle rustling is not just part of history. A short piece examines a blind professor who uses some of the first text-to-speech technology on computers. He also writes about an auction of exotic cars, a murder case requiring the services of a forensic geologist, forty-four million scrap tires that form a mountain hidden from view along the western edge of California's Central Valley, and repairs made to one of Massachusetts' most enduring symbols, Plymouth Rock.

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The Ransom of Russian Art

1994

In the 1960s and 1970s, Norton Dodge, an American professor of Soviet economics, traveled to the USSR many times and purchased the works of "unofficial" artists. It was all done very unofficially, requiring him to smuggle the work out himself or arrange to have it shipped illegally to the United States. Eventually, he acquired nine thousand works of art. McPhee examines the man, his motives, and the fates of several of the dissident artists. It is a story that is fascinating, chilling, and suspenseful.

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Annals of the Former World

1998

This volume brings together Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains and Assembling California along with "Crossing the Craton," a new section that completes the transcontinental journey that spanned over twenty years. For that final portion, from Chicago to Cheyenne, he joins W. R. Van Schmus, of the University of Kansas. McPhee had left this section until the last, partly because there are not many surface rocks in the area, partly because little has occurred there in the past billion years, and because it took a while for science to develop methods to penetrate deep into the ground and see what's down there. This book won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize.

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The Founding Fish

2002

In most of his books, John McPhee prefers to keep his personal presence in the narrative to the absolute minimum. The Founding Fish is different. It is first a personal history, second a natural history, and third, an American history. The fish in question is the shad, a tasty fish that was important to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans, including George Washington, who was a commercial shad fisherman, among other things. McPhee fishes for shad during its short spring season in the Delaware River, close to his home town of Princeton, and also travels to the Maritimes and Florida. He relates how a few shad, native of Atlantic waters, and eastern rivers, were transported across the country by train in the 1800s and introduced to Pacific waters.

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The American Shad

Selections from The Founding Fish - 2004

This is an illustrated edition from Meadow Run Press, a limited edition of 500 copies signed by the author.

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Uncommon Carriers

2007

This book begins and ends with travels with Don Ainsworth, an independent long-haul trucker who specializes in carrying hazardous materials over the country's highways. McPhee also travels in a towboat pushing strings of barges longer than the Queen Mary on the Illinois River. We follow lobsters caught in the Cape Breton area of Nova Scotia to the UPS facility in Kentucky, where the story evolves into that of the huge sorting facility where lobsters and everything else get shipped everywhere. McPhee rides in the cabs of coal trains from Nebraska and Kansas to the coal fields of the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, then back to Georgia. He also recreates Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, substituting a modern canoe for Thoreau's handmade dory.
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