Silk Parachute [Hardcover]

John McPhee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2, 2010

A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE’S PROSE PIECES—IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES

The brief, brilliant essay “Silk Parachute,” which first appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become John McPhee’s most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here— highly varied in length and theme—McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a season in Europe “on the chalk” from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and the champagne country of northern France. Some of the pieces are wholly personal. In luminous recollections of his early years, for example, he goes on outings with his mother, deliberately overturns canoes in a learning process at a summer camp, and germinates a future book while riding on a jump seat to away games as a basketball player. But each piece—on whatever theme—contains somewhere a personal aspect in which McPhee suggests why he was attracted to write about the subject, and each opens like a silk parachute, lofted skyward and suddenly blossoming with color and form.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

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. Does eating “eccentric food” count as an athletic endeavor? It does when McPhee lives off the land with Euell Gibbons. And certainly fact-checking as practiced at the New Yorker (the home for earlier versions of these delectable pieces), and described in “Checkpoints,” qualifies as the literary equivalent of an Olympic sport. “Season on the Chalk” is a quintessential McPhee essay––he is a game-changing master of the form––in which the roll and pitch of his sentences embody the topography of Europe’s strange and fabled chalk country. Whatever his subject, McPhee’s virtuoso and deeply engaging essays convey the profound pleasure of attending to the world. --Donna Seaman

Review

“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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (March 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374263736
• ISBN-13: 978-0374263737
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #295,819 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

54 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "The New Yorker" made me a fan!, March 7, 2010

By 

Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Silk Parachute (Hardcover)

"The New Yorker" was one of my first magazine subscriptions after I moved to New York City, and in the first [complimentary] issue there was a short piece about oranges. In those days, "The New Yorker" had no table of contents -- a friend said you were supposed to read everything -- the editors thought everything in the magazine was good -- and no names or bios of the authors, but it didn't take me long to figure out that the piece was written by a fellow from Princeton named John McPhee. I started to collect all of his books -- I'm still looking for an excellent copy of "The Survival of the Bark Canoe" -- that cover made from birch bark does not hold up very well -- and it's been a great joy over the years to read his essays first in "The New Yorker" and later in his collections of essays.

This collection of nine essays is very personal, revealing many of the major influences in his life. His mother was certainly one of the most important, as is demonstrated in the title piece which appeared first in "Shouts and Murmers" in May, 1997. Extracts show not only her importance in his development but provide an example of the writing style which has enchanted me for four decades and more:

"When your mother is ninety-nine years old, you have so many memories of her that they tend to overlap, intermingle, and blur. ... It has been alleged that when I was in college she heard that I had stayed up all night playing poker and she wrote me a letter that used the word "shame" forty-two times. I do not recall this. ...

"There was the case of the missing Cracker Jack at Lindel's corner store. Flimsy evidence pointed to Mrs. McPhee's smallest child. It has been averred that she laid the guilt on with the following words: "'Like mother like son' is a saying so true, the world will judge largely of mother by you." ...and also recited it on other occasions too numerous to count.

"We have now covered everything even faintly unsavory that has been reported about this person in ninety-nine years, and even those items are a collection of rumors, half-truths, prevarications, false allegations, inaccuracies, innuendoes, and canards. ...

"At LaGuardia, she accompanied me to the observation deck and stood there in the icy wind for at least an hour, maybe two, while I, spellbound, watched the DC-3s coming in. ... Wwe went downstairs into the terminal, where she bought me what appeared to be a black rubber ball but on closer inspection was a pair of hollow hemispheres hinged on one side and folded together.

"They contained a silk parachute. ...If you threw it high into the air, the string unwound and the parachute blossomed. If you sent it up with a tennis racquet, you could put it into the clouds. Not until the development of the ten-megabyte hard disk would the world ever know such a fabulous toy. Folded just so, the parachute never failed. Always, it floated back to you -- silkily, beautifully ... Even if you abused it, whacked it really hard -- gracefully, lightly, it floated back to you."

Other essays have only improved with re-reading:

McPhee and his grandson explore the chalk geology of England, France and the Netherlands -- it's amazing that the chalk hills of Dover and the hills of Champagne are of the same material -- and perhaps equally capable of producign fine wine.

In "Swimming With Canoes," he remembers summer camp and fishing and canoe tipping games that helped him greatly in white water trips later on.

His essay on lacrosse is superb, from its Iroquois origins, the European modifications from 1867, and its Ivy League popularity today -- McPhee's love of the game was formed during his senior year on the Deerfield Academy team.

McPhee describes how attending a cold Princeton football game with his father determined his career: "I saw people up there with typewriters, sitting dry under a roof in what I knew to be a heated space. In that precise moment, I decided to become a writer."

Two essays deal with "The New Yorker": he brings his encounters with its editor William Shawn alive, told with easy grace and great humor; and his essay on the magazine's fact checkers justified my long reliance and continual renewals to the magazine.

McPhee describes his daughter's search around the world for "perfect" large format black and-white fine art photography. He finishes the search in New Jersey, McPhee's life long home, and this collection with a delightful homage to the state.

Like the silk parachute, these essays always float back to you: "silkily, beautifully ... gracefully, lightly, [they float] back to you." McPhee has been and continues to be a joy of my reading life.

Robert C. Ross 2010

Readers might enjoy a checklist of McPhee's books; the true collector will recognize that there are many editions and a whole corpus of related materials, as well as "The New Yorkers", a significant proportion of which have had his work over the past four decades. The range of his subject matter over 32 books is astonishing:

· A Sense of Where You Are (1965)

· The Headmaster (1966)

· Oranges (1967)

· The Pine Barrens (1968)

· A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (1969)

· Levels of the Game (1969)

· The Crofter and the Laird (1969)

· Encounters With the Archdruid (1972)

· The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973)

· The Curve of Binding Energy (1974)

· Pieces of the Frame (1975)

· The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975)

· The John McPhee Reader (1977)

· Coming Into the Country (1977)

· Giving Good Weight (1979)

· Basin and Range (1981)

· In Suspect Terrain (1983)

· La Place de la Concorde Suisse (1984)

· Table of Contents (collection, 1985)

· Rising from the Plains (1986)

· Heirs of General Practice (1986)

· The Control of Nature (1989)

· Looking for a Ship (1990)

· Assembling California (1993)

· The Ransom of Russian Art (1994)

· The Second John McPhee Reader (1996)

· Irons in the Fire (1997)

· Annals of the Former World (1998)

· The Founding Fish (2002)

· The American Shad: Selections from the Founding Fish (2004)

· Uncommon Carriers (2006)

· Silk Parachute (2010)

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More Personal Glimpses of McPhee, July 25, 2010

By 

James D. DeWitt "Alaska Fan" (Fairbanks, AK United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Silk Parachute (Hardcover)

John McPhee, in my opinion, has for some 25 years been America's greatest non-fiction writer. Whether it has been his epic, four volume series of geology, or esoterica like The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, or his best work, Coming into the Country, McPhee writes on an extraordinary range of subjects by finding and writing about the amazing people he has encountered, who give us insights into the subjects McPhee has selected.

But not this time. This time the personality is John McPhee, writing about things that have happened to him. Whether it is the delightful title essay, "Silk Parachute," which is worth the price of the book itself, or his lyrical exploration of The Chalk, from England and through France, for the most part these are stories about McPhee, or jokes McPhee tells on himself. And, just occasionally, a glimpse of a truly extraordinary writer, doing what he does best.

I own every published book from McPhee. I have read and re-read them all. This small collection ranks in the top 10%. Highly recommended.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars McPhee as ever, sort of, April 17, 2010

By 

T. Flory (BELLINGHAM, WA, US) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Silk Parachute (Hardcover)

In what may be Mr. McPhee's final book, we are treated to some insights that reveal the origins of some of his other writing. Thoughtful and well written as always, but likely most appreciated by those familiar with his work. While so many marvel at his ability to make otherwise mundane topics interesting, the quality of his writing and the simple ease of reading it never fail in any way. While it would be unfortunate for his readers, if this is his last, it is greatly appreciated.