If you have never enjoyed non-fiction, this book will prove that it's possible to do so. Dense with facts and figures, the narrative is so compelling that you'll forget it's not fiction, you'll take an interest in topics to which you'd previously never given a thought, and you'll wish you could meet the people that McPhee is describing.

This book offers a sampler of McPhee's work, taking excerpts from a dozen books. My favorite involves a rafting trip down the Colorado River to which he invited a radical conservationist and the head of the US Water Reclamation District, who would put dams every 20 miles of the river's length if he could. What a ride! I also really liked his tribute to the Headmaster of Deerfield Academy.

The book's biggest shortcoming is that it is going to make my "to-read" list even longer, because now I am compelled to read the full version of several of these pieces.

I did not enjoy this as much as McPhee's "coming into the country," which is one of my favorites. However, some of the excerpts were pretty good.

Undeniably a work of incredible beauty, at times. But it can be a chore. Things do not happen in this book. McPhee paints pictures in incredible detail, and you are taking in his work. It can create feelings of deep affection and kinship with a world you’ve never known, when it works. Oranges is a perfect example. I have a sort of nostalgia for Indian River. This book feels sophisticated. Either I’m not there yet, or sophistication is dull.

was reading this in the back of the car and told curtis about the good parts. i.e. the basketball player who can see 195 degrees horizontally which is like superhuman peripheral vision. he can also see 70 degrees upward, so when he's looking down he can still see. (apparently "regular" fields of vision are determined/set by logic, not by way of experiments or medical studies or whatever) (“During a game, Bradley’s eyes are always a glaze of panoptic attention, for a basketball player needs to look at everything, focussing on nothing, until the last moment of commitment.”)

And then also the part about that student and prep school headmaster who played catch and lobbed baseballs at each other as hard as they could, ("intent to kill"), until the student tapped out and the headmaster earned everyone's respect.

mcphee essays are the type of essay where it feels like the "Idea" in it takes a whole essay to impart. not that it's super complex, but that he hashes out the vibe from so many angles and they all feel kinda necessary

It's probably a cliche to say that John McPhee is a writer's writer, but that's only because he never seems to have the same acclaim among more casual readers. And, as this collection shows, that's a damn shame.

The first John McPhee reader is a well-edited collection showcasing selections from his first dozen books and cover everything from the cultivation and selling of fruit (Oranges), an in-depth profile of two tennis stars (Levels of the Game), the quirky scientists who design and built atomic bombs (The Curve of Binding Energy), the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (A Roomful of Hovings) and more. Taken as a whole, it's nothing short of stunning that McPhee is able to cover to much ground and do it all so well; he feels equally at home going into scientific workings of nuclear propulsion as he does writing about basketball.

Of course, as anybody who's read McPhee before knows, the core of this book is based around two kinds of writing: writing about people and writing about nature. And in the book's strongest sections, McPhee does both. The excerpt from Encounters with the Archdruid is so detailed, you feel not only like you're riding in a canoe down the Colorado River, but that you know both Floyd Dominy and David Brower, are party to their fighting and know it's because they're both equally passionate about their work.

But that's only one section. His trip in a birchbark canoe is just as good, as a working vacation to a Scottish island. It's all good, and like the best anthologies, it made me want to pick up each individual volume. Highly recommended.

I read what I wanted to out of this- it's nice that the book covers a wide range of topics. I like his sportswriting the most- it really digs into the thought processes behind the most minute decisions of a game.

This is as good of an introduction to McPhee's body of work as any... Certainly there are some topics that will interest the reader more than others (for this soul, those offerings would include Georgia, Atlantic City, the Pine Barrens and Arthur Ashe), so it doesn't really serve as a book per se.

Editor William L Howarth provides quality overviews at the beginning of each excerpt. However, I'd skip the intro, which is just too flowery and long-winded.

some of the most detailed, descriptive journalism I have ever read. McPhee was (is?) a staff writer for the New Yorker and wrote on a multitude of topics, always digging far beneath the surface of his characters and their hobbies, passions, interests. you gotta be in the mood for this type of reading; i try to imagine myself reading an issue of the New Yorker when I pick up this book, so that I can make sure I finish at least one of the book excerpts that are included in this collection. although this is all non-fiction, it is absolutely a form of literature. mcphee's writing skills far exceed those of most journalists i have come across.

Genius!

McPhee is a fantastic writer, but I have to admit that this is not my favorite format for reading his work. Instead of choosing one topic you like and being subsumed in the full flow of the piece, you're instead plopped into completely different worlds every chapter. And some of the chapters are bound to be less interesting for you, even if you're a big McPhee fan.

I fucking love John McPhee. I never cussed on Goodreads before, but there it is. His writing is just so good. He's a master of creative nonfiction. The reader is a great introduction to his work in all its depth and breadth. Now I want to read each and every book that was excerpted for the reader, as if I didn't already want to read everything he wrote.

Great selection of Excerpts from Mcphee's books.