Table of Contents is a collection of eight pieces written by John McPhee between 1981 and 1984. Geographically and thematically, they range from Alaska to New Jersey, describing, for example, the arrival of telephones in a small village near the Arctic Circle and the arrival of wild bears in considerable numbers in New Jersey, swarming in from the Poconos in search of a better life ("Riding the Boom Extension," "A Textbook Place for Bears").

In "North of the C.P. Line," the author introduces his friend John McPhee, a bush-pilot fish-and-game warden in northern Maine, who is also a writer. The two men met after the flying warden wrote to The New Yorker complaining that someone was using his name. Maine also is the milieu of "Heirs of General Practice," McPhee's highly acclaimed report--virtually a book in itself--on the new medical specialty called family practice. Much of it takes place in the examining rooms of a dozen young physicians in various rural communities, where they are seen in the context of their work with a great many patients of all ages.

Two relatively short pieces revisit the subjects of earlier McPhee books. "Ice Pond" demonstrates anew the innovative genius of the physicist Theodore B. Taylor, who long ago designed miniature atomic bombs and has recently developed a way of making and using ice with impressive results in the conservation of electrical energy. "Open Man" describes a summer day in New Jersey in the company of Senator Bill Bradley.

In "Minihydro," various small-scale entrepreneurs in New York State set up turbines at nineteenth-century mill sites and sell electricity to power companies, which must buy it, in compliance with the National Energy Act of 1978. A nice little country waterfall can earn as much as two hundred thousand dollars a year for someone with such a turbine. And in "Under the Snow," McPhee goes into black bears' dens in Pennsylvania in winter, where he becomes intoxicated with affection for some five-pound cubs. They remind him of his daughters.

Reviews

Here is McPhee at his most ingenuous and winning, a writer for all seasons. --George Core, The Sewanee Review