Showing results by author "John McPhee"

Draft No. 4 is an elucidation of the writer's craft by a master practitioner. In a series of playful but expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he's gathered over his career and refined during his long-running course at Princeton University, where he has launched some of the most esteemed writers of several generations. McPhee offers a definitive guide to the crucial decisions regarding structure, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces and presents extracts from some of his best-loved work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny.

To geologists, rocks are beautiful, roadcuts are windowpanes, and the earth is alive, a work in progress. The cataclysmic movement that gives birth to mountains and oceans is ongoing and can still be seen at certain places on our planet. One of these is the Basin and Range region centered in Nevada and Utah.

From Pulitzer Prize-winner John McPhee, author of The Founding Fish, comes the fascinating story of an often overlooked, yet vitally important part of America. This first-hand account of the transportation sector features evocative portraits of the men and women who deliver our consumer and industrial goods.

Those who have traveled into America’s only remaining frontier rarely come back out the same. Only in Alaska can we come close to understanding what our forefathers must have felt upon their arrival in the New World. McPhee brings to this narrative the qualities that have distinguished him in the field of travel literature—tolerance, brisk, and entertaining prose, and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice.

John McPhee's Pulitzer Prize-winning Annals of the Former World takes readers on mind-expanding adventures in geology. In the first book, Basin and Range, McPhee traveled to Nevada with a proponent of plate techtonics. Now, an engaging sceptic working for the United States Geological Survey is his guide to some of eastern America's most fascinating geologic formations.

Rising From the Plains takes McPhee to the high country of Utah along the Continental Divide. His guide is David Love, "the grand old man of Rocky Mountain geology". Helping McPhee see the physical changes that have shaped this region over millions of years, Love also traces his own family's history in this oil-rich, windswept land.

Few 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.

Thirty years ago, the theory that continents are comprised of drifting plates—plate tectonics—evoked more scorn than serious research. Today, this revolutionary theory continues to dazzle and challenge geologists and laymen alike. Assembling California explores an area uniquely demonstrative of the plate tectonic theory: California, which according to “tectonicists,” is breaking apart at its seams.

The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute", which first appeared in The New Yorker over 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 travels, a US Open golf championship, and a season in Europe "on the chalk" from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Netherlands and France.

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.

"John Updike", by Adam Gopnik; "The Fadeaway", by Roger Angell; "The Promised Land", by Evan Osnos; "Checkpoints", by John McPhee; "The Queen", by Sasha Frere-Jones; and "Curious Cases", by David Denby.

Fabulously entertaining and filled with the intriguing trivia of life, Irons in the Fire is another impeccably crafted collection of seven essays by John McPhee. His peerless writing, punctuated with a sharp sense of humor and fascinating detail, has earned him legions of fans across the country.

"Some Nukes" by Hendrik Hertzberg; "Cruise Control" by Ben McGrath; "After Stevens" by Jeffrey Toobin; "Everybody Have Fun" by Elizabeth Kolbert: "Pioneer" by John McPhee; "Don't Ask Me" by Paul Rudnick; "The Long War" by Sasha Frere-Jones.

"Not Insane", by Hendrik Hertzberg; "Madoff and his Models", by Ron Chernow; "The Replacement", by Jeffrey Toobin; "Spin Right and Shoot Left", by John McPhee; "Tiny Bubbles", by Mike Peed.

In this issue: "Indicted" by Amy Davidson Sorkin: Robert Mueller's distinctly American indictments; "The Arms Dealer" by Mike Spies: How an N.R.A. lobbyist made Florida the testing ground for pro-gun policies; "The Afterlife of Pablo Escobar" by Jon Lee Anderson: In Colombia, a drug lord's posthumous celebrity brings profits and controversy; "Direct Eye Contact" by John McPhee: The most sophisticated, most urban, most reproductively fruitful of bears.

"In Search of a Strategy", by Steve Coll; "S'long Jeet", by Roger Angell; "Phi Beta Football", by John McPhee; "The Antidote", by Ian Frazier; "Freedom Fighter", by Alexis Okeowo; and "Young Love", by Anthony Lane.

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.

"Sparrin' Words", by Hendrik Hertzberg; "J. D. Salinger", by Adam Gopnik; "Bearable", by Lillian Ross; "A Night at the Movies", by John Seabrook; "The Trafficker", by Patrick Radden Keefe; "The Patch", by John McPhee; and "Castle in the Air", by Paul Goldberger.

"Options", by Steve Coll; "Ringers", by Reeves Wiedeman; "Unsung", by Tad Friend; "The Lyme Wars", by Michael Specter; "The Orange Trapper", by John McPhee; "Mastiff", by Joyce Carol Oates; and "Life and Undeath", by David Denby.

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.