The Second John McPhee Reader

February 26, 1996
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.

January 1, 1996
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

February 15, 1996
McPhee was the quintessential "New Yorker" essayist before Tina Brown took the helm. His enlightened, serious, yet playful essays showcased a narrative talent worthy of the best fiction writers. Twenty years after the first reader of his work comes this set of lengthy excerpts from 11 books published since 1975. The passages from "Coming into the Country," his popular book on Alaska, include a harrowing account of a pilot who survived 80 days after a winter crash in the wilds of the Yukon. Other noteworthy extracts include, from "Rising from the Plains," the story of Ethel Waxham, who arrived in Wyoming by stagecoach in 1905 to teach in a one-room schoolhouse; from "Assembling California," two set pieces: one on the 1848 discovery of gold, the other on the 1989 Los Angeles earthquake; and from "The Ransom of Russian Art," McPhee's profile of Norton T. Dodge, one of many eccentrics who populate McPhee's books and the man who smuggled to the U.S. what is perhaps the world's greatest collection of dissident artwork from Communist Russia. ((Reviewed Feb. 15, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)