The Second John McPhee Reader [Paperback]

John McPhee (Author), David Remnick (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 1996

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

McPhee is a hands-on writer. Working for a farmer, he sells produce off trucks and vans in New York City's Greenmarket program (Giving Good Weight). He hitches a ride on a U.S. merchant marine ship and survives a pirate attack in Guayaquil, Ecuador (Looking for a Ship). He goes on patrol across majestic terrain with a battalion of the ever-ready Swiss army (La Place de la Concorde Suisse). In four geology books excerpted here (Assembling California, etc.), he travels from the Appalachians to the Sierra Nevada in the company of scientists who help him chart the continental shifts that created the North American landscape. Whether he is discussing Alaska's rugged settlers, altruistic young doctors in rural Maine, Los Angeles-area residents fighting rock slides or art collector Norton Dodge, who smuggled 10,000 nonconformist artworks out of the Soviet Union, McPhee's precise, graceful prose explores his subjects' hopes, fears and motives amid life's sheer unpredictability. This delightful anthology (a sequel to one published by FSG in 1977) gathers some of McPhee's most enduring work.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Call it "new journalism" or "creative nonfiction," The New Yorker profiler McPhee is the quintessential master of the genre. This collection picks up where the first McPhee Reader (LJ 1/1/77) left off and gathers selections from 11 books published since 1975. Whether describing plate tectonics, marching with the Swiss army, or exploring the wilds of Alaska, McPhee draws the reader into the scene. Like a carpenter constructing a fine house, he selects his building materials carefully so that each part supports the others and contributes to the overall structure of the piece. The lifeblood of his writing comes, as in a novel, from his profiles of people and the stories spoken in their own voices. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries as a teaser introduction or a supplement to McPhee's unabridged works.?Cathy Sabol, Northern Virginia Community Coll., Herndon
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (February 28, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374524637
• ISBN-13: 978-0374524630
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #139,177 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

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another great collection, July 6, 1998

By A Customer

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

Not quite as wonderful as the first John McPhee reader. But that may be because the first collection inspired me as I was beginning my career as a reporter. Objectively, the second "Reader" is every bit as inspiring in its lucid, meticulous prose and McPhees ability to convey the details about a person or a place that make them come alive on the page.