Includes selections from the author's eleven books published since 1975
Described by Robert Lipsyte as 'the high point of American sports journalism', John McPhee's Levels of the Game, nominally about a tennis match between two of the greats of tennis history, redefined what it meant to be a sports writer. Written by four-times finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for non-fi[...]
When John McPhee returned to the island of his ancestors--Colonsay, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainland--a hundred and thirty-eight people were living there. About eighty of these, crofters and farmers, had familial histories of unbroken residence on the island for two or three hundred y[...]
The outcome of a major research project on development, security and culture, this outstanding collection, along with a second volume Human Values and Global Governance, outlines the emerging field of global studies and the theoretical approach of global social theory. With an impressive, internatio[...]
Electronic games have established a huge international market, significantly outselling non-digital games; people spend more money on The Sims than on "Monopoly" or even on "Magic: the Gathering." Yet it is widely believed that the market for electronic literature -- predicted by some to be the futu[...]
What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, at his adventurous best, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation. Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in fr[...]
The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, i[...]
Starting in 1902 at a country school that had an enrollment of fourteen, Frank Boyden built an academy that has long since taken its place on a level with Andover and Exeter. Boyden, who died in 1972, was the school's headmaster for sixty-six years. John McPhee portrays a remarkable man "at the near[...]
This account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968 begins with the ball rising into the air for the initial serve and ends with the final point. McPhee provides a brilliant, stroke-by-stroke description while examining the backgrounds and attitudes wh[...]
This is the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the plane and the rigid airship - huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. John McPhee chronicles the perhaps unfathomable perseverance of the aircraft's sucessive progenitors.
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"The John McPhee Reader," first published in 1976, is comprised of selections from the author's first twelve books. In 1965, John McPhee published his first book, "A Sense of Where You Are"; a decade later, he had published eleven others. His fertility, his precision and grace as a stylist, his wit [...]
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years
Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel [...]
"La Place de la Concorde Suisse is John McPhee's rich, journalistic study of the Swiss Army's role in Swiss society. The Swiss Army is so quietly efficient at the art of war that the Isrealis carefully patterned their own military on the Swiss model.
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"The Control of Nature is John McPhee's bestselling account of places where people are locked in combat with nature. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strageties and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking is his depiction of the main c[...]
An account of a kayak and canoe journey through the Brooks Range wilderness, impressions of urban life and political activity, and portraits of people in the bush make up a study of contemporary Alaska[...]
An imaginative approach to cooking, offering numerous recipes for main dishes and accompaniments made from wild berries, roots, nuts, and leaves[...]
This path-breaking volume explores cultures of energy, the underlying but under-appreciated dimensions of both crisis and innovation in resource use around the globe. Theoretical chapters situate pressing energy issues in larger conceptual frames, and ethnographic case studies reveal energy as it is[...]
Theodore Taylor was one of the most brilliant engineers of the nuclear age, but in his later years he became concerned with the possibility of an individual being able to construct a weapon of mass destruction on their own. McPhee tours American nuclear institutions with Taylor and shows us how clos[...]
"You people come into the market--the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun--and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your stringbeans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something won[...]