The John McPhee Reader

More John McPhee to be listed soon…
First Edition.
In 1965, John McPhee published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are: in the decade since, he has written eleven others.
His fertility, his precision and grace as a stylist, his wit and uncanny brilliance in choosing subject matter, his crack storytelling skills have made him into one of our best writers: a journalist whom L.E. Sissman ranked with Liebling and Mencken, whom Geoffrey Wolff said “is bringing his work to levels that have no measurable limit,” who has been called “a master craftsman” so many times that it is pointless to number them.
Each book in that even dozen is represented in The John McPhee Reader; a fat, delightful volume that contains much of his best writing. William L. Howarth has made the selections in consultation with McPhee, choosing carefully so that each piece in the book stands on its own, even if it has been taken from a longer narrative. (Howarth has also supplied a checklist of McPhee’s published works and an introduction that outlines McPhee’s career and breaks ground for assessing his achievement.) The John McPhee Reader contains writings on basketball and the environment, on tennis and oranges, on the secret development of a visionary aircraft and the poorly guarded plutonium in the nation’s nuclear industry, on birch-bark canoes and the Hebrides, and more; he is, as Edward Hoagland wrote, “the most versatile journalist in America.” This omnibus book bears witness not only to the diversity of McPhee’s interests but also to his consistent fascination with the people involved in his stories- craftsmen, headmasters, physicists, athletes, and others, all of them alive on the page. Readers familiar with John McPhee’s work know what pleasure awaits them in this book.
Newcomers will find it an excellent way to begin.