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    The Second John McPhee Reader, Part One
    The Second John McPhee Reader, Part One
    The Second John McPhee Reader, Part One
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Second John McPhee Reader, Part One

    Written by John McPhee

    Narrated by Nelson Runger

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMar 11, 2008
    ISBN9781440798870
    The Second John McPhee Reader, Part One
    Author

    John McPhee

    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 over 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.

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    Reviews for The Second John McPhee Reader, Part One

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      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.