The John McPhee Reader

The John McPhee Reader - Paperback The John McPhee Reader
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Hardcover: 0-374-17992-1; $
Paperback: 0-374-51719-3; $15.00US

The John McPhee Reader, first published in 1976, is comprised of selections from the author's first twelve books.

In 1965, John McPhee published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are: a decade later, he had published eleven others. His fertility, his precision and grace as a stylist, his wit and uncanny brilliance in choosing subject matter, his crack storytelling skills have made him into one of our best writers: a journalist whom L.E. Sissman ranked with Liebling and Mencken, who Geoffrey Wolff said "is bringing his work to levels that have no measurable limit," who has been called "a master craftsman" so many times that it is pointless to number them.

The John Mc Phee Reader - Hardcover Each book in that even dozen is represented in The John McPhee Reader, a fat, delightful volume that contains much of his best writing. William L. Howarth made the selections in consultation with McPhee, choosing carefully so that each piece in the book stands on its own, even if it has been taken from a longer narrative. Howarth has also supplied a checklist of McPhee's published works (1960-1976) and an introduction that outlines McPhee's career and breaks ground for assessing his achievement. The John McPhee Reader contains writings on basketball and the environment, on tennis and oranges, on the secret development of a visionary aircraft and the poorly guarded plutonium in the nation's nuclear industry, on birch-bark canoes and the Hebrides, and more; he is, as Edward Hoagland wrote, "the most versatile journalist in America." This omnibus book bears witness not only to the diversity of McPhee's interests but also to his consistent fascination with the people involved in his stories--craftsmen, headmasters, physicists, athletes, and others, all of them alive on the page. Readers familiar with John McPhee's work know what pleasure awaits them in this book. Newcomers will find it an excellent way to begin.

WILLIAM L. HOWARTH teaches English at Princeton University. He is the author of two forthcoming books on Henry D. Thoreau--The Book of Concord and Thoreau in the Mountains.

Reviews

McPhee is "the most versatile journalist in America." --Edward Hoagland, The New York Times Book Review

For those who are familiar with his work in its original form, this collection re affirms just how good McPhee is at what he does. For those who aren't, it provides a solid introduction to his versatility...We become privy to the widening dimensions of his reportorial domain--a landscape fertile and diverse enough to accommodate hybrid flying machines as gracefully as it does oranges, one that can appreciate the skills of a dragline operator as much as those of a theoretical physicist. Plant something in this landscape and it will most assuredly thrive. --J. N. SILVERMAN, The Washington Star

"McPhee's powers of description are such that we often feel the shock of recognition even when what is being described is totally outside of our experience…He penetrates the surfaces of things and makes his way toward what is essential and unchanging." --Richard Horwich, The New Republic

"What makes a piece of John McPhee's reportage so reliably superior--like a bamboo flyrod or a well-centered postage stamp? It is easy to identify the ingredients. Most obviously, he finds interesting things to write about…Then there is his facility for dreaming up odd and out-of-the-way approaches to his subjects…Add to this his knack for illustrating with amusing anecdotes...And there you have an approximate John McPhee recipe, lacking only the dramatic confrontations, the interesting characters and the unusual vantage points, which I neglected to mention." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times