I've been meaning to read McPhee for awhile. Perhaps I should've waited to find a full book by him. It is nice to read a clip of a work by him, and to finish it. It's a bit like reading a magazine. I never would have read about Bill Bradley and the Deerfield headmaster otherwise. Which is good?

A terrific place to start, but really this is dipping one's toes. McPhee is a consummate journalist, one of the best I've ever encountered at simply packing each line, paragraph, and piece with valid, juicy information. The man was my gold standard when I wrote Deaf Side Story and remains an idol today.

But it's not just the prose, it's his topics. One could say he is (often) an "environmental" writer, but that's too simple, and misses the mark: what McPhee does so well is to pick the exact focal point within a larger field, be it art of geology, and zero in on what's important.

Not just a "reader," this is a primer on solid, valuable non-fiction.

One of the he Masters of narrative nonfiction!

This volume, originally published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1976, contains essays and articles written between 1965 to 1976. I couldn't find a paperback edition with the cover that is on the one we have, but I'm pretty sure it is the same book.

I couldn't swear that I read all of the pieces in the book aloud to Maggee, but we certainly read many of them (not in this collection, but in others or in stand-alone volumes)... and very much enjoyed them.

The "Date I finished..." refers not to our original readings but to the date this volume was logged at Goodreads and this copy was added to the BML.

Good, entertaining nonfiction. Gets a little dry at times but he is very good at making what he is interested in interesting to others.

I love John McPhee's work. It's not a fast read but his work is beautiful and meticulous.

This was Anna's pick for our book exchange. I did not get to read every piece but the ones I did read I liked very much. He has a way of making the mundane seem terribly interesting. My favorites were "The Barrens" and the one about the art museum director, Sorry I can't recall the name of that one at the moment., but it was a fascinating look at a person who is really excellent at his job. I guess that is th genius of McPhee.

McPhee is ideal for readers who have outgrown Hunter S. Thompson and seen through Tom Wolfe. He is sometimes dragooned into the ranks of the ‘New Journalists’ - wrongly. Unusual for an American writer, McPhee is so self-effacing you wonder whether his shoes even leave footprints. He seems capable of injecting almost subject - canoes, sports, nuclear physics, oranges - with interest, and he writes with an unflashy, quietly stylish grace. This is a collection of excerpts from McPhee’s first twelve books and is perhaps the best introduction to his oeuvre. I rather envy anyone coming to it for the first time.

Learn something you might know about people and places in the United States.

I read this a good twenty years ago and found it to be very interesting and varied. It started me on reading his books.

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Good writing but somewhat outdated and perhaps excursive for today's readers. Try instead McPhee's "Annals of the Former World", Pulitzer Prize winner and a very solid five stars.