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A literary legend's engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate des...

Keine Beschreibung.

A literary legend's engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate des...

In the quiet still hours of the evening on May 10, 1980, a young nation faced its most crucial hour. Two Cuban MiGs were dispatched by Cuba's competent authority. Their ultimate destination Cay Santo Domingo a small cay in the southern hemisphere of the Bahamas. Their intended target: HMBS Flamingo, a one-hundred-and-four-foot Bahamian patrol vessel with two Cuban fishing vessels, Ferrocemento 54 and Ferrocemento 165, in tow. The remaining ho...

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For ...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion yearsTwenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book nev...

You people come into the market-the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring 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 number...

Theodore Taylor was one of the most brilliant engineers of the nuclear age, but in his later years he became concerned with the possibility of an individual being able to construct a weapon of mass destruction on their own. McPhee tours American nuclear institutions with Taylor and shows us how close we are to terrorist attacks employing homemade nuclear weaponry.

La Place de la Concorde Suisse is John McPhee's rich, journalistic study of the Swiss Army's role in Swiss society. The Swiss Army is so quietly efficient at the art of war that the Israelis carefully patterned their own military on the Swiss model.

From the outwash plains of Brooklyn to Indiana's drifted diamonds and gold, John McPhee's In Suspect Terrain is a narrative of the earth, told in four sections of equal length, each in a different way reflecting the three others-- a biography, a set piece about a fragment of Appalachian landscape in illuminating counterpoint to the human history there, a modern collision of ideas about the origins of the mountain range, and, in contrast, a cen...

Coming into the Country is an unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans. It is a rich tapestry of vivid characters, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of the bush. Readers of McPhee's earlier books will not be unprepared for his surprising shifts of scene and ordering of events, brilliantly combined i...

A classic of reportage, Oranges was first conceived as a short magazine article about oranges and orange juice, but the author kept encountering so much irresistible information that he eventually found that he had in fact written a book. It contains sketches of orange growers, orange botanists, orange pickers, orange packers, early settlers on Florida's Indian River, the first orange barons, modern concentrate makers, and a fascinating profil...

This is an extraordinary tale of life on the high seas aboard one of the last American merchant ships, the S.S. Stella Lykes, on a forty-two-day journey from Charleston down the Pacific coast of South America. As the crew of the Stella Lykes makes their ocean voyage, they tell stories of other runs and other ships, tales of disaster, stupidity, greed, generosity, and courage.

This is the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the plane and the rigid airship - huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. John McPhee chronicles the perhaps unfathomable perseverance of the aircraft's sucessive progenitors

This is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master. "(McPhee) again shamelessly employs his go-to strategy: crafting sentences so energetic and structurally sound that he can introduce apparently unappealing subjects...and persuade us to care about them."--Craig Taylor, The New York Times Book Review.w.

The seventh collection of essays by the Pulitzer-winning non-fiction writer, divided into two sections with the first focusing on sport and the second bringing together pieces that have not previously appeared in books, such as magazine pieces, memorials and reflections.

A long-awaited new book by the nonfiction master, winner of the Pulitzer PrizeFew fish are as beloved-or as obsessed over-as the American shad. Although shad spend most of their lives in salt water, they enter rivers by the hundreds of thousands in the spring and swim upstream heroic distances in order to spawn, then return to the ocean. John McPhee is a shad fisherman, and his passion for the annual shad run has led him, over the years, to le...

The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacher.

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 linksland of St. Andrews at an Open Championship. Part 2, called "An Album Quilt, " is a montage of fragments of varying length from p...