The Second John McPhee Reader

The Second John McPhee Reader
Published by Farrar; Straus & Giroux
Hardcover: 0-374-25686-1; $27.50US
Paperback: 0-374-52463-7; $14.00US

This second volume of The John McPhee Reader includes material from his eleven books published since 1975, including Coming into the Country, Looking for a Ship, The Control of Nature, and the four books on geology gathering under the title Annals of the Former World: Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, and Assembling California.

McPhee's work has the quality of permanence…Over the years, McPhee's writing, on all subjects, has evolved. His characters and narrative structures are more complicated and surprising. He is looser, funnier, and, at the same time, his engagement with the physical world and moral problems consistently deepens... A book like this Reader should provide the flavor of this more ambitious phase of McPhee's career, its radiant maturity. The pieces and excerpts gathered here show off a writer who not only is in absolute command of his craft--his sentences, his structures, his sense of humor--but also revels in the pleasures of a fragile world and makes sure we take note. Read his set piece on the bear in Coming into the Country and your sense of man's place in the wild is forever changed; read about the rock avalanche in "Los Angeles Against the Mountains" and no sense of security in the face of nature's strength is ever possible again. --from the Introduction by David Remnick

Reviews

As an example for writers John McPhee remains without peer. To our good fortune he revels in a universe full of things to understand, and there is nobody better at sharing that joy with his readers. --Christopher Shaw, The Washington Post Book World
Mr. McPhee has created a style--blending detailed reporting with a novelistic sense of narrative--and a standard that have influenced a whole generation of journalists. --Timothy Bay, The Baltimore Sun
John McPhee is our best and liveliest writer about the earth and earth sciences. He overspreads his territory like an ice sheet, and yet his touch is light. He can distribute silt and sand as deftly as he wears down mountains. --Wallace Stegner, Los Angeles Times Book Review
A writer for all seasons. --George Core, The Sewanee Review