McPhee is the maestro.

McPhee's style is a pleasure to read. He makes the obscure interesting. He takes delight in the arcane. He discovers interesting facts about this world that make life worth living.

John McPhee can do no wrong. Just pick up any of his erudite collections and learn something or merely watch him learn something. Outstanding read--particularly the last piece titled "Brigade De Cuisine".

John McPhee looks at the commonplace and gets at the heart of the people of the Greenmarket. This is how we used to go shopping before Krogers.

The fact that I made it through a collection of stories that included an 80-page discussion of the chef at a French restaurant in the suburbs of New York attests to McPhee’s well-documented skills as a writer and reporter.

All the pieces in this compilation are typical McPhee--i.e., gems--but my favorite is "Brigade de Cuisine", the best piece of writing about cooking and food I've ever read.

The last story about the chef is exquisite.

I love John McPhee. This has five shorter (for him) essays, most memorably about a farmers' market and a restaurateur. He writes characters so vividly.

I don't think I'd read this one before. Five old New Yorker articles from the mid-70s. Great stuff, and really hasn't dated. No surprises there: I'm a serious John McPhee fanboy. You should be, too.

1. New York's Greenmarket, a big farmer's market, is the title article, back when farmer's markets were new. McPhee talks to the farmers/vendors, mostly, and works for a couple of them for awhile. The farmers generally liked the black people best as customers, finding them less fussy. Then the Spanish, and the wealthy whites are the least popular: fussy and rude. The farmers like getting paid much more than wholesale, and the customers like good produce at reasonable prices. Win-win, and 4 stars. 73 pp.

2. New Jersey Public Service had a serious proposal to build a large, floating nuclear power plant 3 miles offshore, in the early 70s. McPhee talked to the engineers, the biologists, and the oceanographers studying the proposal. The utility seemed to be doing a careful and methodical job , and the scientists appreciated the work. The biologists were more dubious about the project, the oceanographers more supportive. No fatal technical issues were found -- the design was tested for a simulated million-year storm (a super-hurricane) and a simultaneous shipwreck of a supertanker on the enclosing breakwater. Citizen opposition had begun, but no permits had been granted when the project was put on indefinite hold in 1978. 5 stars 44 pp.

3. McPhee meets one New York's 2 pinball wizards, tries out his favorite Bally machine, then the two wizards meet at the Circus Circus off Times Square. Short, sweet, very entertaining. I was never very good at pinball. McPhee's piece makes me want to play a game or three. 4 stars, 12 pp.

4. A canoe trip down Maine's St. John River, in Aroostook County, almost to Canada. McPhee's companions include a Saltonstall, a Cabot from Boston, and a Byrd, a descendant of the polar explorer. At the time, there was an active proposal to build Lake Dickey, a large hydropower pool, but the Maine river remains largely a wilderness waterway today. 3.5+ stars, 47 pp.

5. "Brigade de Cuisine" is a article about a chef-owner and his wife, the pastry chef, who operated a restaurant in the wilds of upstate NY, and insisted on anonymity for both themselves and their restaurant, which was about to move anyway. "Otto", trained in Switzerland, grew up in Spain and worked there again later, where he met "Anne", his wife. McPhee spent considerable time with them, much of it in the kitchen, listening and eating -- McPhee says that the 20 0r 30 best meals in his life were at the couple's rural restaurant. There might be more lists of ingredients and dishes here than I really needed to know, but this is also the most entertaining essay in the book. Here's "Anne", who's served a Chivas to a customer, who accuses her of serving something cheaper (it was Chivas): "You get out of here and you *never* come back!" The woman ran for her car. 4 stars, 60 pp.

This was feeling like a three-star McPhee to me as I wound my way through it. When you have favorite authors, and read everything of theirs, you inevitably face moments of realization; "this might be my least favorite book of my favorite author." Bittersweet.

But, the last piece in this book 'Brigade Du Cuisine' won me over and brought the book safely up into the middle realms of his body of work.

He and I had an equipment shootout, which he seemed to think he was winning. He put up his new tent, an ice-blue JanSport with glass wands and a three-quarter length fly, the whole affair a subtle compromise—in breathing and impermeable nylons—between the statistical probabilities of incoming water and air. Round, repulsive, mychophane, it appeared to be a model of the Houston Astrodome, its ceiling four feet high. 

The first of what could be a whole lot of McPhee for me (thanks, Morgan!). Not a word out of place; still lively and vivid: I heard a truck backfire in New York City, I tasted strange things in a secret restaurant, I heard a river do a thing I didn’t even know rivers could do. If there’s a problem with reading little journeys like these it’s that it threatens to substitute, too well, for taking (much less writing) my own. 

Always interesting, excellenmt observer and entertaining writer. The chef's story was especially well crafted, but then I know more about cooking than I do about pinball.