John McPhee
Author
Formats
Description
"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...
Author
Description
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...
Author
Description
In this unique book, John McPhee takes us into the world of several fascinating people. His inimitable style reveals the intricate details of his characters' lives.
1. Thomas P. F. Hoving
2. Euell Gibbons
3. M.I.T. Fellows in Africa
4. Robert Twynam, of Wimbledon
5. Temple Fielding
Author
Description
Pieces of the Frame is a gathering of memorable writings by one of the greatest journalists and storytellers of our time. They take the reader from the backwoods roads of Georgia, to the high altitude of Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico; from the social decay of Atlantic City, to Scotland, where a pilgrimage for art's sake leads to a surprising encounter with history on a hilltop with a view of a fifth of the entire country. McPhee's writing is more than...
Author
Description
Heirs of General Practice is a frieze of glimpses of young doctors with patients of every age-about a dozen physicians in all, who belong to the new medical specialty called family practice. They are people who have addressed themselves to a need for a unifying generalism in a world that has become greatly subdivided by specialization, physicians who work with the "unquantifiable idea that a doctor who treats your grandmother, your father, your niece,...
Author
Description
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,...
Author
Series
Description
With his Pulitzer Prize-winning Annals of the Former World, John McPhee explores not only the richly varied surface of the United States, but the geological wonders hidden deep beneath our feet. In this final book of the series, he embarks on a fascinating journey across the basement of the continent-the land masses forming Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and thereabouts-with a professor and geochronologist acting as a guide. Whether Randy Van Schmus is...
Author
Series
Description
For a person who has not encountered John McPhee's lively writing, The Second John McPhee Reader is the perfect introduction. McPhee, author of Coming Into the Country, punctuates his delightful prose with a sharp sense of humor, and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice. Whether he's profiling a northern Maine game warden named John McPhee in Table of Contents, or tracking down a fortune in "unofficial" art from the Soviet Union's...
Author
Description
This account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968 begins with the ball rising into the air for the initial serve and ends with the final point. McPhee provides a brilliant, stroke-by-stroke description
while examining the backgrounds and attitudes which have molded the players' games.
Author
Description
For a person who has not encountered John McPhee's lively writing, The Second John McPhee Reader is the perfect introduction. McPhee, author of Coming Into the Country, and Assembling California punctuates his delightful prose with a sharp sense of humor and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice. Whether he's working for a farmer in the Greenmarkets in Harlem, Brooklyn or the Upper East Side in Giving Good Weight, or trekking...
13) Basin and range
Author
Formats
Description
The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world--a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds...
Author
Formats
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...
Author
Formats
Description
The Delaware Water Gap, where the Delaware River cuts through the Appalachian Mountains, is a bucolic and peaceful landscape. However, the calm landscape conceals the tortuous geological history of this region and the equally complex debates concerning the geological past of the eastern United States.
17) Silk parachute
Author
Formats
Description
Ten essays cover a wide range of topics, including recollections of the author's youth and discussions of lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, weird foods he has been served, and a season in Europe.
Author
Formats
Description
McPhee begins his adventure riding with Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of an 18-wheeler hauling nearly 30 tons of highly toxic chemicals from North Carolina to Washington. He continues his journey on a towboat pushing over 1,000 feet of barge up the narrow channel of the Illinois River. He rounds out his account crawling through Nebraska, Kansas, and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming in massive coal trains. Along the way, he tells the stories of...
Author
Formats
Description
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,...