From Publishers Weekly
McPhee is a hands-on writer. Working for a farmer, he sells produce off trucks and vans in New York City's Greenmarket program (Giving Good Weight). He hitches a ride on a U.S. merchant marine ship and survives a pirate attack in Guayaquil, Ecuador (Looking for a Ship). He goes on patrol across majestic terrain with a battalion of the ever-ready Swiss army (La Place de la Concorde Suisse). In four geology books excerpted here (Assembling California, etc.), he travels from the Appalachians to the Sierra Nevada in the company of scientists who help him chart the continental shifts that created the North American landscape. Whether he is discussing Alaska's rugged settlers, altruistic young doctors in rural Maine, Los Angeles-area residents fighting rock slides or art collector Norton Dodge, who smuggled 10,000 nonconformist artworks out of the Soviet Union, McPhee's precise, graceful prose explores his subjects' hopes, fears and motives amid life's sheer unpredictability. This delightful anthology (a sequel to one published by FSG in 1977) gathers some of McPhee's most enduring work.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Call it "new journalism" or "creative nonfiction," The New Yorker profiler McPhee is the quintessential master of the genre. This collection picks up where the first McPhee Reader (LJ 1/1/77) left off and gathers selections from 11 books published since 1975. Whether describing plate tectonics, marching with the Swiss army, or exploring the wilds of Alaska, McPhee draws the reader into the scene. Like a carpenter constructing a fine house, he selects his building materials carefully so that each part supports the others and contributes to the overall structure of the piece. The lifeblood of his writing comes, as in a novel, from his profiles of people and the stories spoken in their own voices. Highly recommended for public and academic libraries as a teaser introduction or a supplement to McPhee's unabridged works.?Cathy Sabol, Northern Virginia Community Coll., Herndon
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
