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    The Patch
    The Patch
    The Patch
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Patch

    Written by John McPhee

    Narrated by John McPhee

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    An "album quilt," an artful assortment of nonfiction writings by John McPhee that have not previously appeared in any book. The Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is divided into two parts. Part 1, "The Sporting Scene," consists of pieces on fishing, football, golf, and lacrosse-from fly casting for chain pickerel in fall in New Hampshire to walking the links land of St. Andrews at an Open Championship. Part 2, called "An Album Quilt," is a montage of fragments of varying length from pieces done across the years that have never appeared in book form-occasional pieces, memorial pieces, reflections, reminiscences, and short items in various magazines including The New Yorker. They range from a visit to the Hershey chocolate factory to encounters with Oscar Hammerstein, Joan Baez, and Mount Denali. Emphatically, the author's purpose was not merely to preserve things but to choose passages that might entertain contemporary readers. Starting with 250,000 words, he gradually threw out seventy-five per cent of them, and randomly assembled the remaining fragments as "An Album Quilt." Among other things, it is a covert memoir.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 13, 2018
    ISBN9781980005353
    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 Patch

    4.5/5

    22 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This was a wonderful essay collection (his seventh), and as usual with McPhee’s work, most of them were previously published in New Yorker magazine, but none of them have been seen in a book before. His wildly varied essays have been gracing the pages of New Yorker since 1963. This book’s essays are separated into two section, “The Sporting Scene,” yeah, on sports of all sorts, and “An Album Quilt,” which was about just about everything else under the sun. That second section would make an excellent primer for someone new to McPhee, as a way to introduce them to the wide scope and joy of his writing. There are so many pieces in the Quilt, and a number of them have been edited down to quite short pieces. It was such a curiosity to see this deviation from standard McPhee stylings, though I also realized that everything was still under his studied control.That said, I found myself growing weary of hearing about an N.C.A.A. lacrosse game, wishing that the piece had been edited much more. I felt some kinship upon finding a New York Times review in which they also found the lacrosse essay the weakest of the bunch. Other than this piece on this sport which I’ve enjoyed watching for decades, I’ve hardly ever found my interest lagging while reading his more than thirty books. As most every bookstore customer or friend that I’ve ever spoken to about McPhee’s books will attest to, I always cited his book Oranges as an example of him holding a reader’s interest in the palm of his hand about (almost) any topic. Reading an old review of this book in the National Review the other day, I read a couple of lines from Nick Ripatrazone that sounded spot-on. “One of McPhee’s talents is noticing something and nudging it toward an essay.” There was another line that reflected perfectly on McPhee’s age and style. “More writers of McPhee’s age could learn from his example: find a subject and story, pick up a notebook, and then listen, watch, and wait.”John McPhee is now 90, and I always fear that I may not be graced with that many more essays by this master, but I promise to be thrilled to have any of them … even if he takes another shot at lacrosse.
    • 5/5
      Delightful as ever. On the greatly improbable chance that someone is only now hearing about John McPhee and wondering if this is the place to start: sure, start here. Anywhere will work. McPhee is, in my mind, a master of the conversational non-fiction tone and a first-ballot hall of famer. This loose, hodge-podge collection passes through subjects as swiftly and lightly as a canoe. A joy to read as always. Worth it for any of the pieces.
    • 4/5
      A collection of essays by the great nonfiction writer John McPhee. He is such a wonderful writer that almost every subject he tackles is made interesting. I started with the entertaining album section, thinking I would skip the first part of the book devoted to sports. But from fishing to Lacrosse all those selections proved worth reading also.