New Releases by John McPhee

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 design. In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to—people to profile, regions he meant to portray. There are so many examples that he plans to go on writing these vignettes, an ideal project for an old man, he says, and a “reminiscent montage” from a writing life. This first volume includes, among other things, glimpses of a frosty encounter with Thornton Wilder, interrogative dinners with Henry Luce, the allure of western Spain, criteria in writing about science, fireworks over the East River as seen from Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, the evolving inclinations of the Tower of Pisa, the islands among the river deltas of central California, teaching in a pandemic, and persuading The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. The result is a fresh survey of McPhee’s singular planet.

Se c''è un libro in grado di dividere i lettori fra chi rischia di contrarre in una forma o nell''altra il morbo del tennis, e chi invece ne risulta immune, è questo. Dove si rivive, un punto dopo l''altro, la semifinale di Forest Hills 1968 fra Arthur Ashe e Clark Graebner – la prima disputata da un tennista nero agli albori dell''èra Open, ma anche e soprattutto la prima partita di tennis raccontata dall''interno del luogo enigmatico e fino ad allora inesplorato che il gioco abita, e spesso devasta: la mente del tennista. Guardandola per caso alla CBS, John McPhee era subito rimasto incantato dal magnifico arabesco che i colpi dei due protagonistiu00ad – diversi in tutto, e in primo luogo nello stile – disegnavano sulu00adl''erba. Ma rivedendo il match insieme a Ashe e Graebner – ascoltandone i racconti, trascrivendone le reazioni – McPhee lo ha poi ricostruito, in «Livelli di gioco», con due soli accorgimenti: la demoniaca accuratezza descrittiva che ha fatto di lui una leggenda della narrativa americana, e i veri ingredienti del tennis: collera, spavento, esaltazione, freddezza, sconforto, orgoglio. Gli stessi che qualche mese prima McPhee aveva scoperto vivendo per quindici giorni a pochi centimetri di distanza dal prato su cui il tennis moderno è nato, per ascoltare e poi ritrarre dal vero, nel secondo pezzo che compone questo libro, uno dei suoi personaggi più indimenticabili: Robert Twynam, giardiniere capo di Wimbledon.

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 hours in the afternoon will unfold a tyranny of unsettling events resulting in the tragic loss of life and property for the Bahamas. The crises plunged the region into a geopolitical crisis and set in motion a cascading set of circumstances that will affect the young nation for the rest of its existence.Final Sunset is the riveting account of the fatal sinking of HMBS Flamingo by Cuban MIGs on May 10, 1980. It recounts the harrowing tale of heroism and survivorship. The gritty and unrelenting human will to make it home after their routine day took a most unfortunate turn on one of the darkest moments in Bahamian history.

A una certa età ogni scrittore desidera essenzialmente una cosa: vuotare i propri cassetti, prima che lo faccia qualcun altro. Non sempre ne vale la pena, ma se i cassetti sono quelli di John McPhee, c’è il caso che contengano – be’, un nuovo, inimitabile, imprevedibile pezzo di John McPhee.

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 pieces done across the years that have never appeared in book form—occasional pieces, memorial pieces, reflections, reminiscences, and short items in various magazines including The New Yorker. They range from a visit to the Hershey chocolate factory to encounters with Oscar Hammerstein, Joan Baez, and Mount Denali. Emphatically, the author’s purpose was not merely to preserve things but to choose passages that might entertain contemporary readers. Starting with 250,000 words, he gradually threw out 75 percent of them, and randomly assembled the remaining fragments into “an album quilt.” Among other things, The Patch is a covert memoir.

Canadian Professional Engineering and Geoscience: Practice and Ethics, 6e, is a unique and comprehensive text for today''s Canadian students and practising professionals. Structured in five parts, the text is written in an approachable and engaging style that effectively covers practice and ethics topics while offering advice for readers to become effective professionals. The authors guide readers through professional licensing, practice, ethics, and environmental practice and ethics using history, case studies, examples, and images to bring the issues to life. The text devotes an entire chapter to preparing readers for the Professional Practice Examination (PPE), including practice questions to bolster success. Canadian Professional Engineering and Geoscience is up to date with Engineers Canada''s practice and ethics syllabus and is the recommended study guide for this section of the PPE. The coverage in this sixth edition includes all provinces and territories of Canada and contains updated, new, and revised content and cases including the fascinating new case history: "Accidental Overdose: The Therac-25 Radiation Therapy Accidents." This edition has expanded its Employment, Management, and Consulting sections with new and relevant Canadian cases to keep readers engaged and connected to the content. Canadian Professional Engineering and Geoscience: Practice and Ethics is a vital professional resource for study and reference.

The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacher Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer’s craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and he presents extracts from his work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. In one essay, he considers the delicate art of getting sources to tell you what they might not otherwise reveal. In another, he discusses how to use flashback to place a bear encounter in a travel narrative while observing that “readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.” The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising—and revising, and revising. Draft No. 4 is enriched by multiple diagrams and by personal anecdotes and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Throughout, Draft No. 4 is enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world.

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.

"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 numbers on our hanging scales." So opens the title piece in this collection of John McPhee''s classic essays, grouped here with four others, including "Brigade de Cuisine," a profile of an artistic and extraordinary chef; "The Keel of Lake Dickey," in which a journey down the whitewater of a wild river ends in the shadow of a huge projected dam; a report on plans for the construction of nuclear power plants that would float in the ocean; and a pinball shoot-out between two prizewinning journalists.

First published in book form 1985, 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. The essays in this collection, which The New York Times called "pretty close to flawless," offer an excellent introduction to the work of one of our finest writers.

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.

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.

John McPhee''s The Ransom of Russian Art is a suspenseful, chilling, and fascinating report on a covert operation like no other. It offers unprecedented insight into Soviet culture at the brink of the Union''s collapse. In the 1960s and 1970s, an American professor of Soviet economics forayed on his own in the Soviet Union, bought the work of underground "unofficial" artists, and brought it out himself or arranged to have it illegally shipped to the United States. Norton Dodge visited the apartments of unofficial artists in at least a dozen geographically scattered cities. By 1977, he had a thousand works of art. His ultimate window of interest involved the years from 1956 to 1986, and through his established contacts he eventually acquired another eight thousand works—by far the largest collection of its kind. McPhee investigates Dodge''s clandestine activities in the service of dissident Soviet art, his motives for his work, and the fates of several of the artists whose lives he touched.

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

A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE''S PROSE PIECES—IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become John McPhee''s most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here— highly varied in length and theme—McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a season in Europe "on the chalk" from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and the champagne country of northern France. Some of the pieces are wholly personal. In luminous recollections of his early years, for example, he goes on outings with his mother, deliberately overturns canoes in a learning process at a summer camp, and germinates a future book while riding on a jump seat to away games as a basketball player. But each piece—on whatever theme—contains somewhere a personal aspect in which McPhee suggests why he was attracted to write about the subject, and each opens like a silk parachute, lofted skyward and suddenly blossoming with color and form.

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.

McPhee, in prose distinguished by its warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character, looks at the people who drive trucks, captain ships, pilot towboats, drive coal trains, and carry lobsters through the air: people who work in freight transportation.

"Ethics and Law for the Health Professions" provides an accessible and clinically relevant introduction to ethics and health law. It adopts a reflective approach to a wide range of key areas of modern health care. The layout of the book clearly distinguishes between law and ethics, and its structure is carefully designed to ensure that topics are covered in a logical, sequential order, with each chapter both introducing new concepts and building upon its predecessors. The book draws on case material and ethical thought used in all the health professions, and the second edition has been extensively changed to reflect changes in law and ethics since 1998.

Lauded as "a fishing classic" ("The Economist") upon its publication in hardcover, McPhee''s 26th book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume.

In 1957--long before colleges awarded degrees in creative nonfiction and back when newspaper writing''s reputation was tainted by the fish it wrapped--Princeton began honoring talented literary journalists. Since then, fifty-nine of the finest, most dedicated, and most decorated nonfiction writers have held the Ferris and McGraw professorships. This monumental volume harbors their favorite and often most influential works. Each contribution is rewarding reading, and collectively the selections validate journalism''s ascent into the esteem of the academy and the reading public. Necessarily eclectic and delightfully idiosyncratic, the fifty-nine pieces are long and short, political and personal, comic and deadly serious. Students will be provoked by William Greider''s pointed critique of the democracy industry, eerily entertained by Leslie Cockburn''s fraternization with the Cali cartel, inspired by David K. Shipler''s thoughts on race, unsettled by Haynes Johnson''s account of Bay of Pigs survivors, and moved by Lucinda Frank''s essay on a mother fighting to save a child born with birth defects. Many of the essays are finely crafted portraits: Charlotte Grimes''s biography of her grandmother, Blair Clark''s obituary for Robert Lowell, and Jane Kramer''s affecting story of a woman hero of the French Resistance. Other contributions to savor include Harrison Salisbury on the siege of Leningrad, Landon Jones on the 1950s, Christopher Wren on Soviet mountaineering, James Gleick on technology, Gloria Emerson on Vietnam, Gina Kolata on Fermat''s last theorem, and Roger Mudd on the media. Whether approached chronologically, thematically, randomly, or, as the editors order them, more intuitively, each suggests a perfect evening reading. Designed for students as well as general readers, The Princeton Anthology of Writing splendidly attests to the elegance, eloquence, and endurance of fine nonfiction.

The first book from the legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee, tells about Bill Bradley when he was the best basketball player Princeton had ever seen. When John McPhee met Bill Bradley, both were at the beginning of their careers. In A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee delineates for the reader the training and techniques that made Bradley the extraordinary athlete he was, and this part of the book is a blueprint of superlative basketball. But athletic prowess alone would not explain Bradley''s magnetism, which is in the quality of the man himself—his self-discipline, his rationality, and his sense of responsibility. Here is a portrait of Bradley as he was in college, before his time with the New York Knicks and his election to the U.S. Senate—a story that suggests the abundant beginnings of his professional careers in sport and politics.

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 that comprise Annals of the Former World.

Starting in 1902 at a country school that had an enrollment of fourteen, Frank Boyden built an academy that has long since taken its place on a level with Andover and Exeter. Boyden, who died in 1972, was the school''s headmaster for sixty-six years. John McPhee portrays a remarkable man "at the near end of a skein of magnanimous despots who...created enduring schools through their own individual energies, maintained them under their own absolute rule, and left them forever imprinted with their own personalities." More than simply a portrait of the Headmaster of Deerfield Academy, it is a revealing look at the nature of private school education in America.