John McPhee is an inspired observer, outdoorsman and a writer with ultimate mastery of the English language.

This is an extract from the jacket. "The Control of Nature is John McPhee's bestselling account of places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature. In Louisiana, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has declared war on the lower Mississippi River, which threatens to follow a new route to the sea and cut off New Orleans and Baton Rouge from the rest of the United States. Icelanders confront flowing red lava in an attempt to save a crucial harbor. In Los Angeles, basins are built to catch devastating debris flows from the San Gabriel Mountains.

Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking is his depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those attempting to wrest control from her stubborn, sometimes foolhardy, more often ingenious, and always arresting characters."

John's books frequently appear serialized in the New Yorker. Over the years I've read all of his 29 books. Many of his books like 'Basin to Range' are slow, many would consider them dull" because they're primarily about geology. But individually and collectively they're my favorite books and I reread them on a regular basis.

They're intensely interesting: 'Coming into the Country' is a collection of stories about the people of Alaska (way pre Sarah Palin), Informative to a fault: 'Oranges'
and wonderfully absorbing, his newest, 'Uncommon Carriers'.

'Uncommon Carriers': Again an overview: "Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the
French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the “tight-assed” Illinois River on a “towboat” pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being “a good deal longer than the Titanic.” And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff in 1839.

Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author’s warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character." I enjoyed this book so much that I tried to read just a few pages a day to make it last, reading other books the rest of the time

His little book, 'the making of a bark canoe' is classic McPhee. Full of painstaking detail about one young man's obsession with making authentic bark canoes, with simple tools, and canoeing trips with him to test them.

John McPhee is an avid outdoorsman. It permeates his books.

His books grown on one, become old friends and companions in life. A calm accurate, enthralling and literate observer of the worlds he discovers for the rest of us. Perhaps the best counter to too much fast and electronic information that I know of in out interactive, online, plugged in world, which I love also.

Three impressive stories that are as topical as ever today, as climate change is finally being taken somewhat seriously. Don't get me wrong, this is not a book about climate change. But it illustrates – in McPhees steady and beautiful prose – how humans have been ignoring the forces of nature forever and how our short term memories get the better of us time and time again.

So I'd read it to learn how to better detect the ironies of our efforts to overcome nature for "the common good" while keeping in view how changes have to be looked with more of a geo-historical view. But I'd also just read it for McPhees gobsmacking allegories and his ability to land punchlines just by "telling the story right".

Tremendous. Good writing complements amazing research and legions of primary sources that the author talked to.

Discusses the attempts by man to hold back nature in 3 regions: the Mississippi River, which wants to jump to the Atchafalaya and in the process abandon New Orleans and the entrenched Chemical industry; Icelandic volcanoes, specifically a 1973 eruption on a small but crucial island (fishing port); and Los Angeles attempting to hold back the debris from the San Gabriel mountains, a near-impossible and incredibly expensive task. Man's hubris on full display, and the author spends a lot of time in each instance discussing the fact that every attempt to hold back nature has consequences that impact others. Not everyone can win!

On the Mighty Mississip, the army corps of engineers are in charge of a dam and lock system at Old River, to keep it from taking too much water from the Miss. The competition for the right water level from the various constituents - industry, fishing, recreational, municipalities is all focused on the Corps. There is a huge levee system along the river that has to be continually raised, which increases the river's power and makes it more likely to be able to overrun river control.

LA and the San Gabriels are the biggest example of hubris, as the steepness of the mountains and the frequency of forest fires (the chapparal is meant to burn every ~30 years) creates massive debris flows. When the summers have fires, the winter is likely to have a debris flow upon heavy rain. These flows happen regularly, and the truly destructive ones can happen once a decade. "Even with geology functioning at remarkably short intervals, the people have time to forget it." The city has built debris basins in every canyon, but these can be overtopped. The effort and expense to keep the basins clear is extraordinary. And yet.

My favorite section of the book was when the author just walked into the campus of Caltech and asked for a geologist. He winds up getting an education from a variety of serious professors, about faults (and the strange kink in the San Andreas, which is compressing at the kink as the East Pacific Rise and the Pacific Plate continue to move), rock quality, boulders, and the universal agreement that trying to hold it all back is a fool's errand. The rub: most of the professors live in or near he mountains.

Great complement to "Stuff Matters" in my reading list. A treatment of the great things humans have engineered contrasted by the things we ultimately cannot control. And both very well written.

Crazy...crazy...what we think we can do to change the course of nature! In three long essays, McPhee exposes our insane overconfidence and ridiculous hubris, all to serve the short-term.

In the essays "Atchafalaya" and "Cooling the Lava", the rampaging Mississippi and flows of hot lava are temporarily diverted and held back.

The final essay, "Los Angeles Against the Mountains", is a classic. No longer will I worry about all the reports of total "disaster" in the media each year when the San Gabriel mountains of Southern California burn, and the destructive debris flows inevitably follow. It's all part of a completely normal cycle. The residents are only getting what has happened regularly for tens of thousands of years. Yet they build there anyway, protected from history by forgetfulness and absolved from reason by deliberate ignorance. And we all pay for their stupidity through increased taxes which support the multitude of control works, cleanup efforts, firefighting, and federal insurance. McPhee lays it all out for your amazement.

From the era when John McPhee was becoming uneditable, three long pieces from The New Yorker on the engineering challenges of the Mississippi delta, a volcanic island in Iceland, and debris flows from the San Gabriel Mountains into Los Angeles. The first two are pretty fascinating, the third less so, and all could have been shorter, but worthwhile nonetheless.

Doesn't meet the wonder inducing 'Annals of the Former World', a journey through geological time. These three elongated essays on our attempted control of nature feel like unnecessarily long National Geographic articles. They are sorely missing the visual information of maps, diagrams and pictures to clarify where words can't.

This is some of McPhee's most fascinating and most frightening work. It follows some of man's most audacious attempts to control his natural environment. While these herculean efforts have met with some success it is clear that the success is only temporary. The book was written in 1989. Climate change and complacency are Mother Nature's allies and she is currently beginning to express her contempt for the way we've treated her.

McPhee is an excellent writer, witty and incisive. He's got a gift for summarizing a person in just a few words of description, yet giving you a fuller picture than most would with a whole paragraph. I thought Atchafalaya and the Iceland story were perfect. In both he really enjoyed how much storytelling you can get out of just telling peoples' and cities' names. The Los Angeles story goes against the other two by dwelling less on the control of nature, and I think it suffers a little for it. I think more than controlling nature (which it's not clear the Angelenos are making a real attempt at), the stories are more strongly linked by the self-confidence and indignation found by humans worldwide that this place they've inhabited, in some cases just for a few generations, is their home, and there's nothing they deserve more than to continue living there, no matter the cost to their communities, governments, and the earth itself.

I don't know if it was a function of the wrong book at the wrong time, but I found myself often getting bored with this effort of John McPhee's from the late 80s. I always gave McPhee credit for being able to make a wallpaper seminar given in northern England sound like the high point of a trip to Europe, but in The Control of Nature, a book about things decidedly more interesting than wallpaper, I found my mind kept wandering.

It may not have helped that for two out of his three subjects, I have peripheral experience: in Atchafalaya, McPhee describes the efforts by the Army Corps of Engineers to keep the Mississippi River contained within its traditional courses, and in Los Angeles Against the Mountains. the efforts of the L.A. County Flood Control District to keep the San Gabriel Mountains from squashing Los Angeles into a molehill. I don't know whether working on the Mississippi River (currently) or living near Los Angeles (about the time McPhee was writing this) should have made me more interested or less, but the truth is I found it hard to pay attention. That I had nothing at all similar to the experiences related in Cooling the Lava, where Icelanders saved their town by spraying water on a lava flow that threatened their town, didn't seem to make much difference though--I still had a hard time maintaining interest.

I can't think of any good reason this should be so--McPhee is a good writer. Not too clever, slyly humorous on occasion but not to the point of overdoing it, informative and exhaustive; I can't point to anything that's wrong here. So I'm going to chalk it up to wrong book at the wrong time. That I found his book Looking for a Ship fascinating tells me that I'll still give McPhee plenty of other chances.

In this book the author discusses three cases where people have tried to control nature and geological progression. The three instances are the flow of the Mississippi River, the flow of lava from a volcano in Iceland, and the rock slides in the San Gabriel mountains in California.

The topics are very interesting, and McPhee brings a lot of information to the game. However, his writing style sometimes really hinders his message. He has a tendency to hop around the subject at hand and it affects the continuity of the narrative.

Nice thematic consistency among the three stories, but felt needlessly long and contrived sometimes, like he didn't want to waste part of an interview even if it didn't add anything. Rounding up from what is more realistically 3.5 stars. The three parts in my order of descending preference: Cooling the Lava > Atchafalaya > Los Angeles Against the Mountains

McFee looks at three huge public works project, the damning and redirectioning of the Mississippi via ongoing construction, primarily by the Army Corps of Engineers; attempts in Iceland to redirect the flow of large volumes of lava away from a town by spraying massive amounts of water at the flow edges; and coping with massive debris flows in Los Angeles, as the San Gabriel mountains that abut the city both rise and crumble.

Information here includes some history of the US Army Corps of Engineers, an enlightening look at the history of flooding in New Orleans, an appreciation for the significance of the Atchafalaya, and a look at the geology and natural processes in effect in Los Angeles.Overall, the information presented in The Control of Nature is very interesting. Considering that it was published in 1989, and that I was unaware of the specifics involved, it has clearly not become common knowledge, and thus retains a bit of freshness. It might be nice to see a follow-up by the author, particularly as applied to the Mississippi and Los Angeles issues, in light of events since publication. I confess that I did not look for such, and it may well be out there.

While the information in the book was interesting, it seemed to me that the writing was less so. McPhee offers a host of local personalities to illustrate the impact of these issues on people, and generically that approach is sound. Yet, the impact of that approach was minimal. I never felt that his portrayals went beyond what one might find in newspaper reportage of the day. One need not make characters come alive as a good novelist might, but his portrayals rarely rose above the mundane.

I thought the book would have profited from the inclusion of illustrations. There is a brief section in which drawings are shown of structures no longer present in Iceland, but they added little.