The John McPhee Reader [Paperback]

John McPhee (Author), William L. Howarth (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1982

The John McPhee Reader, first published in 1976, is comprised of selections from the author’s first twelve books. In 1965, John McPhee published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are; a decade later, he had published eleven others. His fertility, his precision and grace as a stylist, his wit and uncanny brilliance in choosing subject matter, his crack storytelling skills have made him into one of our best writers: a journalist whom L.E. Sissman ranked with Liebling and Mencken, who Geoffrey Wolff said “is bringing his work to levels that have no measurable limit,” who has been called “a master craftsman” so many times that it is pointless to number them.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The most versatile journalist in America.”—Edward Hoagland, The New York Times Book Review

“For those who are familiar with his work in its original form, this collection reaffirms just how good McPhee is at what he does. For those who aren't, it provides a solid introduction to his versatility . . . We become privy to the widening dimensions of his reportial domain—a landscape fertile and diverse enough to accommodate hybrid flying machines as gracefully as it does oranges, one that can appreciate the skills of a gragline operator as much as those of a theoretical physicist. Plant something in this landscape and it will most assuredly thrive.”—J. N. Silverman, The Washington Star

“What makes a piece of John McPhee's reportage so reliably superior? . . . Most obviously, he finds interesting things to write about . . . Then there us his facility for dreaming up odd and out-of-the-way approaches to his subjects . . . Add to this his knack for illustrating with amusing anecdotes . . . And there you have an approximate John McPhee recipe, lacking only the dramatic confrontations, the interesting characters, and the unusual vantage points, which I neglected to mention.”—Christopher Lehmann, The New York Times

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (June 1, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374517193
• ISBN-13: 978-0374517199
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #276,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More 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. The same year he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with FSG, and soon followed with The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection, 1969), The Crofter and the Laird (1969), Levels of the Game (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid (1972), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame (collection, 1975), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Walking Around, October 7, 2003

By 

Mary E. Sibley (Carneys Point, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The John McPhee Reader (Hardcover)

In this collection, a distillation taken from his many books, John McPhee describes a premier basketball player, Bill Bradley. Also featured is his, McPhee's, headmaster, Frank Boyden, of Deerfield Academy. Boyden practiced a form of management by walking around.

McPhee tells of the famed oranges of Indian River, Florida. Florida was the only wilderness in the world that attracted middle-aged pioneers. After the Civil War more orange growing developed. Harriet Beecher Stowe bought some land at Mandarin. The orange fever of the 1880's attracted a high portion of Englshmen. The land was as fair and as fine as the promoters intimated. There had been a killer freeze in 1835. Then there was the Great Freeze of 1895 which happened in two stages, one in December, and the other in February. The freeze reduced the number of shipped oranges 97%.

In the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, the most populous state geographically, there are only fifteen people per square mile. The rivers of the Pine Barrens are cedar water. The people of the pines came to be known as pineys. There is a stigma to the term that has never been eliminated.

Thomas Hoving moved from Parks Commissioner to Director of the Metropolitan Musem of Art. Both Hoving and the writer attended Princeton. James Rorimer invited Hoving to work at the Metropolitan Museum when he was a graduate student in art history at Princeton. He became a curatorial assistant in the medieval department. Rorimer had developed The Cloisters. He was a medievalist.

Hoving traveled with Rorimer through Europe. He learned to trust his first impression in regard to the authenticity of a work of art. One has to be saturated with art to know art history. When Hoving was Parks Commissioner he initiated the Happenings. He sought to create vest pocket parks.

Having traced a superb cross the museum purchased to Bury St. Edmunds, Hoving was able to date the cross, 1181-1190. Collecting, of necessity, is done in secrecy so that the prices do not rise. Following Hoving, there is a piece on Arthur Ashe.

Next the Highlands are treated. Crofters are protected by the Crofters' Holding Act. English is spoken at school and Gaelic is spoken at home. There used to be sheep dog trials. There is a piper on the island of Colonsay, Andrew Oronsay. Pipers were important in the era of the clans. The Highlands sound romantic. The reality is that pastures provide rough-grazing, for example. The present laird feels his father was guilty of misplaced benevolence.

Wilderness preservation is a contentious matter. East of the hundreth meridian there is sufficient rainfall for farming. West of it there is not. David Brower is haunted by the lost worlds of Utah overrun by the existence of the dam at Glen Canyon. He was the first executive director of the Sierra Club.

One of the excerpts was written when Jimmy Carter was Governor of Georgia. A characteristic of John McPhee's writing is precision. This is a wonderful sampling of his work.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The finest reporting and prose in the English language, July 6, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The John McPhee Reader (Paperback)

This collection is an inspiration to any reporter or writer. McPhee gets inside his subjects to such a degree that you feel as though you know them, perhaps, better than they know themselves. The first "Reader" contains sections from many of his best known works.