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For a couple of decades, John McPhee's readers have regularly been treated to the products of his wide-ranging curiosity, his apparent compulsion to discover and to share. The five pieces in this collection were written between 1975 and 1979. Three preceded and the two others have followed his projects in Alaska that resulted in the celebrated best seller Coming into the Country. "You people come into the market--the Greenmarket, in the open air under the downpouring sun--and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your stringbeans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something wonderful, you are--people of the city--and we, who are, almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales." So begins "Giving Good Weight," a story of farmers selling their produce in the Greenmarkets of New York City as told by a journalist who went to work for an upstate farmer, and--in Harlem, in Brooklyn--turned into a salesman of peppers. In "The Atlantic Generating Station," McPhee brings his sophisticated research and reportorial skills to the complexity of an awesome, not to say bizarre, plan for the construction of nuclear power plants that would float in the ocean. Along the way we learn fascinating things about oceanography, engineering, marine biology, and the effects of the environmental movement on the academic community. "The Pinball Philosophy"' is a short coruscant shoot-out between two grandmasters of pinball--J. Anthony Lukas, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, and his erstwhile colleague from The New York Times, Tom Buckley. "There are certain basics to remember," Lukas confides. "Above all, don't flail with the flipper." The scene shifts to Maine in "The Keel of Lake Dickey," where a journey down the whitewater of a wild river ends in the shadow of a huge projected dam.
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Copyright ©2000
- 2003 Farrar, Straus
& Giroux |
Giving Good Weight 
The fifth and
longest story, "Brigade de Cuisine," presents an artistic and extra ordinary
chef, who wishes to be anonymous. "He would like to see his work described. He would
like to be known for what he does, but in this time, in this country, his position is
awkward, for he prefers being a person to becoming a personality, his wish to be
acknowledged is exceeded by his wish not to be celebrated, and he could savor recognition
only if he could have it without publicity." He calls himself "Otto." His
wife and patissiere-en-chef is "Anne." Their biographer plumbs their particular
striving for perfection, and records it with contagious respect and delight.