. Rivers themselves come and go like summer rain showers. But they often act as concentrators of the metals we seek.
At the same time you get a view of science in action
* It chronicles the slow rise of plate tectonics and shows how science really works as contradiction, new data and ideas slowly topple old paradigms even as the data gathered for those old paradigms becomes fodder for the new ... and are not themselves always wrong, at least locally.
I could go on and on. All this and more is written in a book that is more of a page turner than most novels I read. A simply stunning job for a normally glacial subject.
It does have some downside.
No pictures and almost no maps (look right before the index to see what maps there are and mark them with book tags -- helps a lot). McPhee is a great writer, but not being able to actually see and place some of this stuff is very disappointing and often grating. I recommend reading with Google earth booted up and handy -- I wish someone would put together a photo and/or map and or Google geo-location concordance for this book.
Even so -- this is one of those books that becomes a treasured friend over time.
Excellent Resource for the layperson........2007-01-15
Though this book is not perfect, it helped me to understand a subject that I have interest in but find difficult to grasp, namely "geology."
McPhee's prosaic writing style sure helped.
Now, the book is long and is a difficult read. But,seriously, how can one write with any depth about geology and it not be somewhat difficult for an average layperson like me to understand?
I often found myself amazed at the age of the Earth and how evidence can be found for its age in some of the strangest and mundane places. I credit McPhee and his style of writing for helping me to "wonder at it all" instead of falling to sleep after 20 pages.
Excellent book.
Average customer rating:
- McPhee's Best Work - Still Relevant Today
- Encounters with the Archdruid
- Encounters with a bad book
- identity and idealism
- hello
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Encounters with the Archdruid
John McPhee
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ASIN: 0374514313 |
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Born in 1915, the mountaineer and outdoorsman David Brower has arguably been the single most influential American environmentalist in the last half of the 20th century; even his erstwhile foes at the Department of the Interior grudgingly credit him with having nearly single-handedly halted the construction of a dam in the heart of the Grand Canyon, and he has converted thousands, even millions, of his compatriots to the preservationist cause through his work with the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and other organizations.
Brower was in the thick of battle when John McPhee profiled him for the New Yorker in a piece that would evolve into Encounters with the Archdruid. McPhee follows Brower into unusually close combat as Brower faces down a geologist who is, it seems, convinced that there is no sight quite so elevating as that of a fully operational mine; a developer who (successfully, it turned out) sought to convert an isolated stretch of the Carolina coast into a resort for the moneyed few--and who provided the title for McPhee's book, wryly opining that conservationists are at heart druids who "sacrifice people and worship trees"; and, most formidable of all, former Interior Secretary Floyd Dominy, who oversaw the construction of a structure that for Brower stands as one of the most hated creations of our time, Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. McPhee offers up an engaging portrait of Brower, a man unafraid of a good fight in the service of the earth, making Encounters an important contribution to the history of the modern environmental movement. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.
Customer Reviews:
McPhee's Best Work - Still Relevant Today.......2007-08-15
I read this book for the first time 36 years after it was written, yet it seems like it was written today. The battles now have different names but the perspectives are still the same. My conclusion after reading it is that as a species human's have the capacity to view the same scenery and information and come to radically different conclusions; lets build on it or lets preserve it. The fundamental difference seems to be how an individual views the world around us; our surroundings exist to serve us or we an integral part of the world. This dichotomy in thinking may explain why some of us become engineers and real estate developers and others become artists and conservationists.
McPhee's genius in this book was to get the archetypes of those two positions to spend time together in a proposed open pit copper mine in the Cascades, a potential resort in Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, and in and around dams along the Colorado River; recording the dialog while describing the landscape. This book is a paean to conservation and one of McPhee's best.
Encounters with the Archdruid.......2007-01-03
David Brower is a major conservationist who leads many environmental groups. In Encounters with the Archdruid, Brower travels to a mountain, an island, and a river, and has battles with various developers in each of the aareas. In the mountains, he encounters Charles Park, a geologist who is pick-happy. ON the island, he meets Charles Fraser, a developer who wants to build a resort on the island. He also goes fafting with Floyd Dominy, who is bent on building a dam to make a lake out of the end of the river. Brower winds some, and loses some, but for the sake of the enfironment, he never gives up.
Encounters with a bad book.......2007-01-02
This book is not very interesting. It is very jumpy and hard to understand. There are many enviormental issues that are barely if at all touched on by the author. Characters are over developed and there is to much background information on unimportant characters. Brower is just on big whinner. Overall it is not that good of a book.
identity and idealism.......2006-09-15
This is not a hagiography, and readers who think McPhee is portraying David Brower as a hero are not reading deeply enough. McPhee presents Brower as a human with faults. But this too is not his purpose. All ideals need champions, and Brower was the environmental champion of the 1970s. That he was a hypocrite to his own cause bears little relevance to his symbolic importance. McPhee carefully establishes Brower's identity such that the reflective reader can draw parallels to their own self-conception and ideas of perfection. Oh, and it's readable too.
hello.......2006-02-28
Part one is very informative. It talks alot about the characters, their personalities, and their backgrounds. We didn't like the fact taht
copper" and "mine" was in just about every other sentence. IN part, we believe the author was trying to emphasize about the characters' obsession and how strongly each man felt for his argument, however it made the section extreemly boring, long, and hard to read. In the second sectoin, the story line picked upi. We enjoyed how throught the novel, the author would continuely add depth and different demensions to the characters with more background information about each characer. Part three was definatly the most enteretaining out of the three with it's fast paced storyline and action scenes. The beginning of the book was slow but then it picked up and ended well.
Average customer rating:
- A Wonderful Relic
- First Class
- A trip around Alaska in the 70's
- Gets better with each read!
- Alaska for Alaskans
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Coming into the Country
John McPhee
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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ASIN: 0374522871 |
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Residents of the Lower 48 sometimes imagine Alaska as a snow-covered land of igloos, oil pipelines, and polar bears. But Alaska is far more complex geographically, culturally, ecologically, and politically than most Americans know, and few writers are as capable of capturing this complexity as John McPhee. In Coming into the Country, McPhee describes his travels through much of the state with bush pilots, prospectors, and settlers, as well as politicians and businesspeople who have their eyes set on a very different future for the state.
Book Description
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 into an organic whole. In the course of this volume we are made acquainted with the lore and techniques of placer mining, the habits and legends of the barren-ground grizzly, the outlook of a young Athapaskan chief, and tales of the fortitude of settlers—ordinary people compelled by extraordinary dreams. Coming into the Country unites a vast region of America with one of America’s notable literary craftsmen, singularly qualified to do justice to the scale and grandeur of the design.
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An unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans
Customer Reviews:
A Wonderful Relic.......2007-09-18
This book is a wonderful relic, the last plausible vision of a living American frontier. In the mid seventies, McPhee went to Alaska to do a few pieces for the New Yorker. He met a lot of trappers, prospectors, and "river people" who'd built moss-chinked cabins and whose individualism, gruff hospitality, and happiness he admired. McPhee made a plea for democratic access to Alaskan land. He argued that land far from roads should remain fair game for homesteaders in perpetuity.
It is odd to read an ode to Alaska's wild immensity at a time when islands are being evacuated in the Aleutians, polar bears are drowning, and the permafrost is melting. The question these days is not whether Americans can still choose to live in more or less untainted outback. The question is whether that outback will soon be transformed beyond recognition, not by oil drilling, but by climate change.
What Coming into the Country offers the twenty-first century is escapism and nostalgia. McPhee's account of the political squabbles over the location of Alaska's capital has lost its relevance, but the rest of the book still comes to life. We meet a mix of clannish Christians, proud native people, and prickly bootleggers in the small, dry town of Eagle. McPhee's tale of a man's survival in sub-zero weather after a plane crash constitutes a minor classic of its own.
The book reminds us how powerful the frontier fantasy remains in American psyches. Can it be harnessed as a metaphor? Can the dream of self-reliance on a private patch of woods help motivate us, indirectly, to cut carbon emissions? It has motivated us to go camping and conserve some wild lands even while ruining others. Still, I suspect that as the environmental movement shifts in response to global warming, we may have to jettison the frontier fantasy. It depends too much on a view of nature as more powerful than man. Whether or not we agree with Bill McKibben that we have arrived at the end of nature, we know that everything is responding to elevated temperatures. There is no untouched patch of land left in Alaska. The romance of a homestead sours when the flora and fauna are marching north past the log cabin, driven by coal and oil fires from all over the planet.
First Class.......2007-07-23
Want to read about the realities of the 49th state????
Want to really learn something about this region???
Want to get good visuals????????
If NOT don't read this book!!!!!!!!!!!!
A trip around Alaska in the 70's.......2007-02-27
I traveled to Alaska in 2006 but lived there in the early 70's. Why I delayed so long in reading "Coming into the Country" I don't know, but John McPhee has taken me back to that earlier day. Both his character and place descriptions are wonderful and make me long for the cabins, the ice break-up, the dogs, the bush planes, and the 55 gallon drums. The Anchorage of today is much changed, but the bush is still there -- Thank God.
Gets better with each read!.......2006-10-03
We bought this book in Nome, Alaska on a visit there in 2001 (my brother owns a flying service there). I took my time reading it the first time. Coming into the Country is not a book to be read quickly, but, rather, one to be savored, taking time for the details to seep into the crevices of one's memory until they become part of one's knowledge base. Every page holds a vast amount of information that if read too quickly blurs to nothingness and is lost.
McPhee's descriptions of the land, its rivers and mountains, its challenges, its beauty, and its people are thorough and draw the reader into the pages of his book. It takes a certain kind of person to survive in the Alaskan bush. I, for one, am drawn to its splendor, its starkness, its fearsomeness, but am sure I don't have the right stuff to live there long term. The river people and others, who thrive in communities like Eagle and Central (even Fairbanks and Juneau), have remarkable stamina and a strong determination to live the lives they choose in their respective settings, all of which are breathtaking in their beauty. McPhee also writes of the tension between the races (Indian and white)and the human dynamic among community members (the good and the no-so-good)that always accompanies the sharing of space and resources.
Over the past five years, I've picked up CITC now and then to re-read parts of it. Most recently, I re-read the whole of Part III Coming into the Country. This is my favorite section because it focuses on the bush and its people, most particularly on Eagle, Alaska located on the Yukon River and just across the International Boundary from Canada's Yukon Territory. (Incidentally, the term "coming into the country" refers to the arrival of a person into the Alaskan bush with the intent of staying. I may move from Michigan to Ohio or New York or California, but, if I go to Alaska, they call it coming into the country. "Brad Snow and Lily Allen came into the country in 1973." "Joe Vogler came into the country in 1944." "John Borg came into the country in 1966" (and he's still there. Check out the Eagle site. Borg has worn many hats in Eagle and still sits on the board of the Eagle Historical Society and Museum. Borg's wife, Betty, is the board's treasurer).
The original copyright on this book is 1976, thirty years ago. The growth in technology since that time has allowed almost every municipality to have their own website. Eagle is no exception. [...]
Carolyn Rowe Hill
Alaska for Alaskans.......2006-08-24
I just finished what I think is one of the true books of Alaska, John McPhee's Coming into the Country. The non-fiction work breaks apart into three subsections, each dealing with an aspect of Alaska that many people who visit for only a short time don't see. Nor should they necessarily; it is clear through the book's 400 plus pages that McPhee, a man from New Jersey, has not only done his homework but gone to great lengths to find the "true Alaska."
The first section, entitled The Encircled River, follows a group of five men (McPhee including himself) as they travel down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range in norther Alaska, whose watershed is "wholly above the Arctic Circle." The men are surveying the Salmon River for possible inclusion in the list of national wild rivers, which would set aside the river and its immediate environs as unalterable wild terrain. At the time of the writing, 1977, Congress was still considering the legislation.
The descriptions of travel down the Salmon merge into a stream of conscious meditation on wildland conservation, the shortage of good fishing in Anchorage, and the native people who live in northwestern Alaska. This section presents the reader with a lay of the land, both physical and emotional, and defines the boundaries of the political, ethical, and moral dilemmas that challenged Alaskans in those pre-pipeline years and that still linger today.
The second section, What They Were Hunting For, is a wonderful snapshot of the original movement in Alaska to move the capital from Juneau to a location closer to Anchorage. Juneau is ringed on all sides by mountains and ocean, providing access for state legislators and the public they represent only via oceangoing ferry or a harrowing and often unreliable plane ride. This isolation was seen as a burden to the represented, a boon to their representitives.
McPhee accompanies the Capital Site Selection Committee as it tours by helicopter potential sites north of Anchorage, most notably near Talkeetna and Juneau. Among the committee members are such famous Alaskans and Arliss Sturgulewski and Willie Hensley. McPhee seems to have an uncanny ability to place himself at the center of the action.
McPhee provides a lengthy history of the naming of Juneau and how the town was founded, suggesting that while its birth and existence may be credited to drunken prospectors' blind luck, this history is as Alaskan as any and justifies naming the town capital.
Better still, McPhee provides some very telling descriptions of Anchorage (my home town) in its 70s heyday. As evidenced here:
"Anchorage is sometimes excused in the name of pioneering. Build now, civilize later. But Anchorage is not a frontier town. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. Anchorage is the northern rim of Trenton, the center of Oxnard, the ocean-blind precincts of Dayton Beach. It is condensed, instant Albuquerque."
McPee appreciates the boom nature of Anchorage, the drive of its citizens to consume. But McPhee is quick to point out this development is not in a vacuum and gives us context in descriptions of the ring of mountains and ocean "stunning against the morning and in the evening light" that surround and cradle the town.
But all of this is building material, foundation for the final and longest chapter whose name also graces the cover of the book itself, Coming Into the Country. The phrase is Alaska backcountry slang for moving into the bush. McPhee spends the bulk of this chapter himself coming into the country, living all four seasons in Eagle, Alaska, nestled in east-central Alaska along the Yukon River. Here, if any feelings of distrust have developed in the reader's mind from McPhee's disparaging remarks about Anchorage or his awkwardness with wilderness travel, all is forgiven. McPhee's portrait of the people who inhabit Eagle as a place and a time is magical. McPhee describes in the words of one Eagle resident the importance of Alaska as a location on the landscape of the American mind:
"In the society as a whole, there is an elemental need for a frontier outlet, for a pioneer place to go - important even to those who do not go there. People are entioning outer space as, in this respect, all we have left. All we have left is Alaska, which, on the individual level, and by virtue of its climate, will always screen its own, and will not be overrun."
McPhee is fair with the local populace - allowing himself to be taken in by a miner's plea upon destroying the ecosystem around a creekbed that the mine is just a "cork in the sea." After rationalizing the destruction in his own head, despite the meager gains of a salt shaker's worth of gold, McPhee declares: "In the ecomilitia, bust me to private."
MePhee also reconciles his fear of bears that manifested itself in the first chapter. Upon his first taste of ursa horibilis McPhee waxes: "In strange communion, I had chewed the flag, consumed the symbol of the total wild, and, from that meal forward, if a bear should ever wish to reciprocate, it would only be what I deserve." In the hands of a less adroit craftsman, this sentiment would risk audience alienation by revealing the author's own still-unrecognized naivetee but McPhee is forgiven and admitted into the fold of his new more wild self.
On such topics as the Alaska state flag, McPhee is equally generous and gives hints at the change Alaska has wrought within his own self.
"The flag, as it happens, was designed by a native. It is lyrically simple, the most beautiful of all American flags. On its dark-blue field, gold stars form the constellation of the Great Bear. Above that is the North Star. Nothing else, as the designer explained, is needed to represent Alaska. It was the flag of the Territory for more than thirty years. Alaskans requested that it become the flag of the new state. The designer was a thirteen-year-old Aleut boy."
While McPhee's painting of the Alaskan soul leaves patches untended, and while the pre-pipeline boom attitude is beginning to feel threadbare at the edges, there is something in McPhee's account that touches bedrock. His myriad anecdotes, woven together with thoughtfully placed historical facts and enlightened yet spare commentary are more than the sum of their parts. There is a feeling upon leaving this book that McPhee somehow got it, got why we are here, and more importantly, what our hopes and visions may lead us to.
Average customer rating:
- Setting the Benchmark for Science Writing
- Explaining the World: A Joy to Read
- No index, please
- The Prose of Rock and Faultlines
- Bravo!
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Assembling California
John McPhee
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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ASIN: 0374523932 |
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As an explainer, John McPhee is a national treasure. The longtime "New Yorker" staff writer has taken us inside the world of art museums, environmental groups, fruit markets, airship factories, basketball courts, and atomic-bomb labs the world over. Here he covers the complex geological history of California, the source of much news today. As Californians daily await the inevitable great earthquake that will send their cities tumbling down like so many matchsticks, McPhee piles fact on luminous fact, wrestling raw data into a beautifully written narrative that gainsays a sedimentologist's warning: "You can't cope with this in an organized way," he told McPhee, "because the rocks aren't organized." As always, McPhee enlarges our understanding of the strange, making it familiar--and endlessly interesting.
Book Description
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.
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A cross-section in human and geologic time, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolvivng and dissolving lands
Customer Reviews:
Setting the Benchmark for Science Writing.......2006-07-18
What McPhee teaches us is that most of California, like most Californians, originally came from somewhere else. And he explains, clearly, beautifully and accurately, the complex geological history and consequences of those events.
Yes, this is my favorite in the geology series. Partly it's because I originally come from California, and know some of the areas he writes about. Partly it's because each of the geology books is a snapshot of of the plate tectonics revolution, and this book, the fourth, presents the latest and most developed snapshot. But mostly it is my admiration for McPhee's willingness to take on one of the most complex topics in geology, the ophiolite sequence and its implications, and the sheer elegance of his explanations. If this isn't a coursebook on California geology, it should be. The synthesis of so much geology is a staggering effort; combined with the lucid, even elegant explanations, this has to rank among the most formidable pieces of science writing ever.
Because this is a McPhee book, it involves much more than just geology. The history of Spanish and American exploration, the California gold rush, the technology of hydraulic mining, the mining ghost towns and, of course, a breathtaking narrative of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; even if geology is not fascinating to you, you will enjoy and admire this book.
This is not McPhee's very best book. That's still "Coming into the Country." But it is the best of the geology books and among the two or three best books McPhee has written. And when you are talking of a writer of McPhee's talent, that's saying a lot. My highest recommendation.
Explaining the World: A Joy to Read.......2005-09-03
_Assembling California_, John McPhee
Also recommended as a supplement to McPhee:
_The Behavior of the Earth: Continental and Seafloor Mobility_, Claude Allegre
Plate Tectonics has joined Darwinism as yet another scientific bulwark under attack in today's America, as shown e.g. at earthage.org, and I thought a review of a couple of popular books on the subject I enjoyed recently that give a very pleasurable overview of this field would be in order.
"The Summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone." John McPhee summarizes his tetralogy surveying the geology of the American continent with this phrase, indicating the depth of time, and the magnitude of forces involved in shaping the earth.
Fleshing this sentence out in the most wonderful fashion by following around a regional geological expert -- in this case Eldridge Moores -- and making the geology a personal story, while explaining technical terms by-the-by, and making the flow of time and movement of continents wash over the reader like a tidal surge, is a remarkable achievement.
_Assembling California_ is the most recently written of his geological tetralogy (gathered together in one volume now as _Annals of the Former World_), and shows the development of Plate Tectonics theory since its inception in the late '60s to the early '90s. One of the books indeed features a completely traditional geologist (_In Suspect Terrain_) who professes much doubt in the theory, while Eldridge Moores, on the other hand, is like a Plate Tectonics prophet, using the theory to explain virtually every geological feature on the planet.
This grumpiness and even hidebound intransigence of 'traditional geologists' who see their entire geological worldview literally swept away by the breathtaking scope of Plate Tectonic theory is a fascinating aspect of the human side of science shown in these books. McPhee himself notes this, referring to geosynclines -- a mainstay of the 'old' geology -- as "a rational fiction", and that "he is following a science as it lurches forward from error to discovery and back to error" (referring to an early mis-constructions).
A book I glanced through, _The Colorado Plateau : a geologic history_, by Daniel L. Baars, has an editorial-style Preface written by just such an annoyed 'old geologist', excoriating the "religious fervour" shown by adherents to the new theory. And I might add that, after reading several books with PT as a basis, I found this book (written in the '70s and re-printed), with it's 'old-style' terminology and complete lack of the plate-tectonic grand-scale overview of why such-and-such a geological feature is there in the first place, to be quite unreadable and boring in the extreme.
The other book in this review, _The Behavior of the Earth: Continental and Seafloor Mobility_, is neither boring nor unreadable, while providing an excellent historical approach to presenting PT theory, from Wegener to the current period (1988 was the date of publication, but this is no drawback from this general reader's perspective). It pays very welcome attention to the subject from a History of Science perspective, with careful attention to the scientists who provided each new advancement, while explaining the technical aspects of the theory with many pictures and diagrams. I found it an excellent supplement to McPhee's book, which mostly lacks visuals to fill out his word-pictures, and I referred many times to the seafloor-spreading and ocean-basin maps while reading McPhee. I don't know how available this book is now, but check the library anyway! Highly recommended.
rms
No index, please.......2004-08-28
The comments of others largely capture the brilliant and compelling writing that makes this book a pleasure to read. I was sorry when I finished it. But please, no index, glossary, or anything else! This is a book for the layman. Even with a glossary, in six months we would forget the precise geological meaning of andesite. What is memorable about this book (and McPhee's other writing on geology) is that the geological terms flow around you and wash over you as if you were an expert in the field. Combined with metaphors that are startlingly original yet perfectly apt, the end result is a glimpse of the depth and possibilities for fascination under the surface story. Mundane details like definitions would make this book dry and boring, just another textbook. Instead, you get the big picture, told in a colorful and informative way, that leaves you educated about geology without feeling like a geologist.
The Prose of Rock and Faultlines.......2004-06-05
With a precision of language and detail, John McPhee brilliantly evokes the terrain of earthquakes, desert, mountains, and coastline of California. McPhee's guide through the geological history and present-day is Eldridge Moores, a geological professor at UC/Davis who knows the land of California perhaps better than anyone and who can "see through the topography and see how the rocks lie in three dimensions beneath the topography." McPhee is Moores' interpreter, a writer for whom descriptions and metaphor comes as easily as geology does for Moores. Together, they take the reader through the diversity of land formations to form a complex understanding of all the forces that have been at work on this strip of land forming much of the west coast of the United States.
For those only marginally interested in geology and topography, this is a difficult read, though it is well worth sticking with it. I myself read it in chunks, only a single chapter at a time, since any more tested my patience. The writing is superb, however, and the information imparted is both instructional and fascinating. When McPhee writes seemingly simple sentences such as, "There were orchards of carobs, figs, and pistachios, and an understory of prickly pears," he paints an entire countryside in just a few strokes of language. What he does with the drier subject matter of basalt and limestone is extraordinary.
Bravo!.......2003-07-12
John McPhee is an essayist of significant talent. His ability to parse the technical into terms both enjoyable and understandable is literally striking. Turning a tome on geology into a page-turner must be one heck of a challenge, but McPhee manages to do so with regularity (see also: Rising from the Plains).
Assembling California is no different. McPhee starts in the Sierra Nevada with geologist Eldridge Moores and ends on the San Andreas fault during the Loma Prieta quake. Throughout, McPhee explains that California is actually an accretion of exotic terrains that tectonically migrated throughout the eons. I'll admit that on rare occasion some content rendered me a bit glassy eyed, but the majority of the writing was excellent and the San Andreas fault section was beyond outstanding.
Taken as a whole, Assembling California is a distinguished finale to McPhee's Interstate 80 geology series that began with Basin and Range and later became a compilation entitled Annals of the Former World.
Average customer rating:
- Not really about oranges...
- Great writing is never outdated.
- Orange you glad he started it all?
- Oranges
- Like the fruit itself, delicious
|
Oranges
John McPhee
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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The Pine Barrens
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ASIN: 0374512973 |
Amazon.com
While many readers are familiar with John McPhee's masterful pieces on a large scale (the geological history of North America, or the nature of Alaska), McPhee is equally remarkable when he considers the seemingly inconsequential. Oranges was conceived as a short magazine piece, but thanks to his unparalleled investigative skills, became a slim, fact-filled book. As McPhee chronicles orange farmers struggling with frost and horticulturists' new breeds of citrus, oranges come to seem a microcosm of man's relationship with nature.
Like Flemish miniaturists who reveal the essence of humankind within the confines of a tiny frame, McPhee once again demonstrates that the smallest topic is replete with history, significance, and consequence.
Book Description
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 profile of Ben Hill Griffin of Frostproof, Florida who may be the last of the individual orange barons. McPhee’s astonishing book has an almost narrative progression, is immensely readable, and is frequently amusing. Louis XIV hung tapestries of oranges in the halls of Versailles, because oranges and orange trees were the symbols of his nature and his reign. This book, in a sense, is a tapestry of oranges, too—with elements in it that range from the great orangeries of European monarchs to a custom of people in the modern Caribbean who split oranges and clean floors with them, one half in each hand.
Customer Reviews:
Not really about oranges..........2006-12-24
Expertly executed. A detailed history of oranges--customs surrounding, growing, marketing, geography--yet if you apply your close reading skills and critical thinking you may find that this work has deeper meaning. Could it also be taking on social issues such as poverty, ignorance, miscenegation, reproductive rights, and just plain old politics. It is certainly intriguing to consider this when drinking in the beauty of the writing and the mastery of weaving a comprehsensive report on all things having to do with oranges. Never dull no matter what your take.
Great writing is never outdated........2006-10-10
"Oranges" was the first of John McPhee's books I ever read. I found a copy at a thrift store about ten years ago, and was absolutely blown away by it. Since then, I've probably read it another six or eight times. There is so much fascinating information in it, covered in such a beautiful way, that I could probably read it once a month and still find it entertaining. I'm here to buy yet another copy, as I tend to loan out McPhee's books to my friends, whether they ask for them or not. Unlike other books I loan out, my friends eventually return the McPhees, if only in hopes that I'll loan them another one. I always do. Oranges has been away for about a year this time, and I'm feeling a powerful urge to read it again.
Whether a lot of the information in the book is out-dated or not is totally immaterial. McPhee's work is not journalism covering current events, it's brilliant literature on non-fictional subjects, in the same way as the writing of Samuel Pepys is well worth reading today, in spite of all his subjects' being deceased.
I recently read Mr. McPhee's "Survival of the Bark Canoe" again, and found it just as hilarious as ever, and just as informative. Mark Twain couldn't have covered the subject as well, or any more entertainingly.
Aside from the sheer quality of his writing, the great thing about John McPhee is that he's so damned prolific. Any time I see one of his books which isn't already in my collection, I snap it up; yet I still haven't managed to read his entire body of work. But, I'm working at it.
Orange you glad he started it all?.......2006-08-15
It's forty years now since this brilliant little mandarin of a book appeared. Early reviewers (and readers of McPhee in the New Yorker) were amused and even a bit ill-at-ease at the entertainment that the author squeezed from a subject as apparently banal as oranges.
Fruit, after all, is hardly a subject for serious discourse and therefore must not be a subject for serious readers. But it was hard to avoid the suspicion that there was something more important about the dynamics of everyday life than about the transient political and artistic events that captured 'serious' attention.(Valley of the Dolls was a best seller that same year)
In the years that followed, we saw a growing realization among scholars that ordinary life was worth study. In fact, the suspicion is even raised that ordinary life may be the thing most worth studying. There has been a spate of books examining such mundane topics as salt, the codfish, apples, spices, coffee, sugar and wine. We have had biographies of diseases and inventions and public manias.
Some of this attention to the mundane has been diluted by its focus on the ordinary object as a marker of greater things: sugar stands for colonialism in Sweetness and Power, public napping stands for a cultural of denial in (No) Time for Sleep and so on.
But increasingly the daily lives of ordinary people-the hohum stuff of most of human existence is seen as worth attention.
Remarkably, it turns out that everyday things are often the most fascinating. Here's a book by the man who played the first card in the genre. It remains remarkably readable and charming and its indirectly indicated concerns are very much alive today.
Oranges.......2006-05-18
First published in the 1960s, Oranges by twice Pulitzer winning journalist, John McPhee got a limited lease of life back in 2000 when Penguin reissued it as a modern classic. And while it's an interesting little book covering pretty much everything to do with oranges, the reportage within doesn't so much as ground the book in its time than date it
You may think that there is not much to say about fruit in general, never mind being specific. But that's where you'd be wrong as, it turns out, the orange has a catalogue of facts literally bursting with juicy trivia. It begins with uses for the fruit around the world, covering methods of eating, seasoning, and even cleaning the floor and removing grease. It explores the etymology of both the fruit's name, and it's scientific name, Citrus Sinensis. Along the way, as it spouts nugget of information in quick succession, we see the orange in history as it began its two thousand year westward journey from China to the Americas until orange growing and juicing became a worldwide industry within itself.
Splitting up chapters of trivia, McPhee shares the outcomes of his meetings with orange barons, orange growers, and other assorted industry types. While interesting to read, the text is littered with anecdotes containing names that will mean nothing to anyone other than their immediate families. And, to top it off, there is a section whereby we learn of new methods being introduced to improve the industry that, even if you have no experience of it, you know has long since been superceded by methods. It doesn't take a genius to know that in a world rife with technology and technological gains, that the huge workforce mentioned in Oranges has long since been made redundant or replaced by immigrant workers.
McPhee's style is immensely readable, the way he dances from fact to fact a delight to read, and when he injects some humour to his catalogue of orange facts, you can't help but raise a smile - at the joke and in appreciation of its wording. His anecdotes do drag, and I think it wouldn't be uncommon to breath a sigh of relief once they conclude.
It's a quick read and a quirky subject, and McPhee's research is to be commended, although much of the journalistic writing -reading it forty years on from publication - has soured. That said, if you know nothing of the orange industry - and oranges in general - then Oranges is a fun little book that should quench that specific hole in your trivia.
Like the fruit itself, delicious.......2006-02-27
For twenty years I have given this book to recent high school graduates, carefully inscribing each book to encourage them to see what McPhee reveals here.
What he reveals most vividly is the idea that there is no such thing as an uninteresting subject; there is only an uninterested reader.
What also impressed me, decades ago, was the notion of connectedness, and the idea that one thing-an orange, a diamond, iron, oil, lead-could reveal everything about our world.
Finally, he deserves five stars because he never gets in the way of his subject, and he has moments of such brilliance-his devotional to Otto, the restauranteur, still ranks as a great moment in writing, fiction or non-that everyone should read him.
My favorite of a shelfull of McPhees, with the Headmaster in a virtual dead heat.
Book Description
Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee explore the ways people interact with the landscapes in which they live. For more than ten years they have traveled the world--from Iceland to Costa Rica, Sri Lanka to New York--uncovering in their photographs a complex weave of human attitudes, both humble and arrogant, in the face of natural elements. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her introduction, "Their images show us a world in metamorphosis, where categories melt and mutate. . . . This is a world where natural sites become shrines and shrines become works of art that represent the landscape; where stone is carved into both sculptures of bodies and homes for bodies; where water is sometimes holy water and sometimes for irrigating crops."
In Costa Rica, for example, healing waters are enshrined in frescoed concrete; in a Hawaiian garden, mangoes and oranges are protected against the cold in brown, paper bag jackets; in Iceland, children play in hot springs created by the runoff of a power plant; in Las Vegas, an artificial volcano erupts on cue. Each of Beahan and McPhee's extraordinary images captures a point of intersection where natural and constructed worlds collide. Their work creates a powerful visual map of the forces of mythology and culture at work in the landscape.
In 1987, Laura McPhee and Virginia Beahan began their photographic work together. Through the use of a large-format camera they are able to jointly participate in this unique collaboration—a process discussed with humor and warmth in John McPhee's afterword, "Laura and Virginia." They have received support for their photography from numerous sources including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Polaroid Corporation, and the Turner Foundation, Inc.
Customer Reviews:
questionning.......2007-06-08
this is the kind of book that should be mandatory in classrooms !
the world as it is...
Hauntingly beautiful; redefines landscape photography for me.......1999-06-07
The photos of this book have the technical excellence of Ansel Adams pictures (except they are not B+W). But they are not vistas of pristine, pretty National parks that Adams shot; here the hand of man is all too present.
Breathtakingly beautiful and wondrous!.......1999-01-24
Beahan and McPhee have eloquently captured both our enmeshment with nature, and Her attempts to hold fast. Photos so beautiful you catch your breath.
Average customer rating:
- Another Treasure from McPhee
- Ballad of the Old Pineys
- The Pinelands
- Anything by John McPhee
- Must read for all NJ residents
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The Pine Barrens
John McPhee
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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Oranges
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Annals of the Former World
ASIN: 0374514429 |
Amazon.com
Contrary to popular opinion, the whole of New Jersey is not a continuous Superfund site enlivened solely by poorly labeled Turnpike exits and skanky diners. In fact, the largest essentially untouched wilderness east of the Mississippi comprises nearly half the state: the New Jersey Pine Barrens. This more than 1,000-square-mile region has only a few thousand inhabitants--the Pineys, whose way of life has remained essentially unchanged since the 17th century. McPhee--one of the finest American essayists of the 20th century--has written an extraordinarily compelling, informative, and insightful book about the botanical, cultural, hydrological, and historical peculiarities of this region. He also details the efforts to save it from the creeping urbanization of nearby Philadelphia and New York City. Very Highly Recommended.
Book Description
Most people think of New Jersey as a suburban-industrial corridor that runs between New York and Philadelphia. Yet in the low center of the state is a near wilderness, larger than most national parks, which has been known since the seventeenth century as the Pine Barrens.
The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acid to be good for farming. On all sides, however, developments of one kind or another have gradually moved in, so that now the central and integral forest is reduced to about a thousand square miles. Although New Jersey has the heaviest population density of any state, huge segments of the Pine Barrens remain uninhabited. The few people who dwell in the region, the “Pineys,” are little known and often misunderstood. Here McPhee uses his uncanny skills as a journalist to explore the history of the region and describe the people—and their distinctive folklore—who call it home.
Customer Reviews:
Another Treasure from McPhee.......2007-04-11
This time John McPhee turns his hand to one of those
anomalous natural treasures that has survived in
spite of intense urbanization. The Pine Barrens are
two-thirds of a million acres-an area the size of
Yosemite that sit beside a major artery of the most
developed region in the country. With the New Jersey
Turnpike to the west and bustling, chintzy Atlantic
City to the East, it's hard to imagine that this great,
weird wilderness could be so little known.
McPhee is the perfect guide to the Pines. He is as
sensitive to the natural history as he is to the
culture. He has a sympathetic ear for both the natives
and the outsiders who wander in from time to time. He's
a writer who can focus on a detail-a threatened fern or
the quality of water and then pull back to the big picture.
A thoroughly entertaining book.
--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and
the novel bang BANG. ISBN 9781601640005
Ballad of the Old Pineys.......2006-06-15
Those of us from the Northeast know that wilderness can be found if you're willing to hit the road and search for it, and also that it's precious and worth protecting from the onslaught of industry and sprawl. But even those familiar with the region's wilderness offerings will be surprised by the natural bounty and remoteness of New Jersey's Pine Barrens area. The masterful essayist John McPhee published this travelogue and study of the area back in 1967, when the depths of the Pine Barrens still offered genuine seclusion form the outside world, with hardy folks still living off the land by picking berries or making charcoal. And this beautiful area was surrounded on all sides by the most urbanized and industrialized blight on Earth. Things aren't quite so rustic there anymore, but reading McPhee's engaging treatise on the area should make modern folks wish to both visit the Pine Barrens area as a valuable slice of nature, and to protect it as a precious and dwindling resource. That's what makes this short but lovable book from the great McPhee a timeless classic for nature lovers. [~doomsdayer520~]
The Pinelands.......2005-12-02
My wife gave me this book in 1978, and I devoured it in one evening. I have since been all over the world, and no matter where I go, the pines are always the reference point for me. My teen years were spent in the pines, with my good friend Tom, where we would travel its dirt roads, canoe its streams and fish its lakes, and hike its trails and roads. Mr. McPhee weaves a story that is so true, so historically rich, and for me, so reminiscent of the years of my youth. Please read this book, and then go and make your own memories.
Anything by John McPhee.......2005-10-04
I have read many of John McPhee's works. They are all excellent and captivating. He writes on so many subjects, it is amazing that they are all great. No wonder he teaches at Princeton, or did as I remember.
Must read for all NJ residents.......2005-10-02
I'll keep this short and sweet: McPhee's The Pine Barrens is an entirely outstanding, fascinating look at the unique area that is the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. McPhee covers Piney culture, the unique ecological nature of the region, its history, and its hidden treasures. The writing is poetic and rich, the people interesting, and the information detailed, thorough and never dull. A really great read that anyone living in NJ should get.
Average customer rating:
- Cattle, cars and cobbles
- Two Great Essays & Five ... Others
- An entertaining and fascinating book by a gifted writer.
- Least piece is best piece.
- A collection of engrossing short pieces, perfectly written.
|
Irons in the Fire
John McPhee
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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Uncommon Carriers
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Pieces of the Frame
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Giving Good Weight
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Looking for a Ship
ASIN: 0374177260 |
Amazon.com
Master essayist John McPhee heard about vehicles in Nevada that resemble police cars, but the cop inside was actually a "brand inspector," a lawman charged with tracking cattle rustlers. Ever curious, McPhee left his home in New Jersey for Nevada and spent a few weeks in those cars. The title essay of this collection is, as we've come to expect from McPhee, well-reported and beautifully written. Also included are essays based on McPhee's observations of a stand of virgin forest in the middle of New Jersey, a huge pile of automobile tires in California, and a long and fascinating look at forensic geologists and how stones tell a story.
Book Description
In this collection John McPhee once agains proves himself as a master observer of all arenas of life as well a powerful and important writer.
Customer Reviews:
Cattle, cars and cobbles.......2002-05-21
What could be more presumptuous than attempting to sit in judgment of writings of John McPhee? Essayist of the American scene for the New Yorker magazine, McPhee is a lodestone for people unheralded, forgotten or simply unknown. When you read his accounts of their lives and work, his use of language, image, empathy will instill them in your memory. There, they will be cherished, later re-examined to be reflected on, or valued, or best of all, emulated. All his subjects are worthy role examples, but that is only a part of the value of reading McPhee's accounts of their lives. His scope is vast, bringing together personalities, history - often at some depth, and other related information. All this seems to pale in the light of his ability form sentences that lead you into novel worlds, elevate your interest in something unexpected, or simply describe an otherwise mundane event.
This book starts with a shock - cattle rustling isn't a practice limited to Hollywood's false sense of history. Cattle duffing remains an active practice in Nevada. Branding, the symbol of ownership, is still subject to the "running iron" in shifting title without accompanying cash exchange. Law enforcement is not applied by gun-toting marshals, but by a Brand Inspector marking tallies in the palm of his hand. McPhee escorts one across vast stretches of the Basin and climbs thousands of feet over the Range to "take attendance" of cattle like a country schoolmarm. There's little limit to how far he must travel - tracking moving cattle may lead him to California or southern Utah. McPhee's descriptions of the country are more than matched by his relation of successful apprehensions of rustlers. His account brings the action into sharp focus and you are beside the Inspector staking out a mountain hideaway.
McPhee raises the term "investigative journalist" to fresh levels of excellence. Other topics in this collection include word processing for a blind author, understanding gravel as evidence, exotic automobiles and the travels and travails of a glacial boulder - a special one. His guidance through these topics is sure, keeping your interest at a peak as he conveys a wealth of information and character description. As with any McPhee book, this one remains timeless. It's worth your attention - and retention.
Two Great Essays & Five ... Others.......2001-10-26
Although I've long heard of the prolific essayist McPhee, I'd never actually read anything by him until now. While I admire his curiosity about the world around him, only of two of the seven essays (all of which were previously published in some form in The New Yorker I believe) really captured my attention. "The Gravel Page" is in fact seventy pages about the compelling subject of geological forensics. It holds together somewhat better than some of the other pieces because McPhee uses several high-profile cases (the kidnapping/murder cases of beer magnate Adolph Coors III in Colorado and DEA agent Enrique Salazar in Mexico) to show how soil analysts can play a key role in solving a crime. Equally compelling (perhaps because it's a topic that has a broader impact), is his foray into the world of auto tire disposal. There are a number of amazing facts he brings to light, the number of tires discarded, the rejection of retreads in the US despite no difference in safety, shredding and recycling entrepreneurs, and most impressive, the amount of recoverable petroleum in each tire. For example, according to McPhee, burning tires yield more energy than lignite coal, with similar emissions. So, let's see, we could be recycling tires for fuel instead of trying to rip more coal of the ground. Hmm, tough call... In any event, these two essays are worth checking the book out of the library for.
The other five essays are as follows: "Irons in the Fire" starts out promisingly enough as a behind the scenes look at modern-day brand inspectors in Nevada, complete with rustlers. Unfortunately, unless you have some particular interest in cattle, digressions and its 50+ pages of length may render it rather numbing after a while. The second piece, "Release," is an entirely mawkish-and thankfully brief-portrait of an author who uses voice-recognition software on his computer to assist his writing. It might have been remarkable fifteen years ago, but we've all seen umpteen of these stories on the local news since then. He tries to milk some humor out of it via the computer's awkward pronunciation, but its just not funny. "In Virgin Forest," is another brief entry, this time about a bit of primordial deciduous forest just across the river from Manhattan in New Jersey. It's kind of neat to discover how it came to survive in pristine form in such an unlikely place, but there's not a whole lot more to it. "Rinhard at Manheim" is perhaps the oddest piece-it's basically the transcribed ramblings of a friend of McPhee's who's a scout at a "exotic car" auction, as he describes the merits and deficiencies of various luxury sports cars. There doesn't seem to be much point-or even humor-to it. The final essay, on the history, repair, and geological origins of Plymouth Rock is rather tedious on the whole, although geologists, stonemasons or history buffs might find it more worthwhile.
An entertaining and fascinating book by a gifted writer........1999-02-11
Once again, McPhee has revealed the fascinating hidden sides to a number of subjects which at first appear ordinary. He is The Master at popularizing Earth Science, and shows why in the most entertaining manner.
Others more talented than I, and who make a living reviewing books, have already reviewed and praised this book. I have a question of the publisher, though. At the front of the book, below the card-catalog data, is the following statement: "A NOTE ON THE BINDING The die on the front of the binding -Lazy J Over Running M Combined- was created by Ellie Wyeth Fox for the author". Where is this die (cattle brand?) to be found? I looked all over my copy of this book and could not find it anywhere.
Least piece is best piece........1997-09-13
As always, McPhee's work is a zenith of style. But, in this collection, his shortest piece is his most fascinating. For, who is this mysterious "Rinard at Manheim," whose knowledge and wit are at least equal to the author's?
A collection of engrossing short pieces, perfectly written........1997-04-30
Mr. McPhee again turns his discerning eye on the work people do, what it entails, what it means to the worker, and (usually), how the author feels about it. Then he expands the context to outline its national, geophysical, geopolitical, economical, or other relevant influence, always in human terms. THIS MAN CAN WRITE!
Here, he ranges from current-day cattle rustling in Nevada, to computers for the blind, to the content of a virgin forest in New Jersey (!), to the mortal hazards faced by high-tech soil-analyzing crimesolvers, to the sheer scope and methods of used tire disposal, to a short piece on an exotic auto auction in Pennsylvania, to the likely origins and the repair of Plymouth Rock. All, thanks to the author, are wonderful to read. But then, so is everything he has published.
Books:
- Undefeated, Untied, and Uninvited
- Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Rom
- Watchdogs of Democracy?: The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public
- Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
- Working With Contracts: What Law School Doesn't Teach You (PLI Press's Corporate and Securities Law Library) (Pli Press's Corporate and Securities Law Library)
- 101 Uses for a Bridesmaid Dress
- A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya
- A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
- A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
- A Piece of Cake: A Memoir
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE
- The Magnificent Irish Wolfhound
- Irish Country Furniture, 1700-1950
- Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty
- The Alfred Hitchcock Story
- The Moonstone
- The Black Lizard Jim Thompson: After Dark My Sweet, The Alcoholics, The Criminal, Cropper's Cabin, T
- Kingmaker: Be the One Your Company Wants to Keep... on Your Terms
- Modern Trends in Logistic Research
- The Bloody Chamber
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
Irons in the Fire
