Böcker av John McPhee

A literary legend's engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design.In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to-people to profile, regions he meant to portray. There are so many examples that he plans to go on writing these vignettes, an ideal project for an old man, he says, and a "reminiscent montage" from a writing life. This first volume includes, among other things, glimpses of a frosty encounter with Thornton Wilder, interrogative dinners with Henry Luce, the allure of western Spain, criteria in writing about science, fireworks over the East River as seen from Malcolm Forbes's yacht, the evolving inclinations of the Tower of Pisa, the islands among the river deltas of central California, teaching in a pandemic, and persuading The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. The result is a fresh survey of McPhee's singular planet.

The Patch is an "album quilt," an artful assortment of nonfiction writings by John McPhee that have not previously appeared in any bookThe Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master. It is divided into two parts. Part 1, "The Sporting Scene," consists of pieces on fishing, football, golf, and lacrosse-from fly casting for chain pickerel in fall in New Hampshire to walking the linksland of St. Andrews at an Open Championship. Part 2, called "An Album Quilt," is a montage of fragments of varying length from pieces done across the years that have never appeared in book form-occasional pieces, memorial pieces, reflections, reminiscences, and short items in various magazines including The New Yorker. They range from a visit to the Hershey chocolate factory to encounters with Oscar Hammerstein, Joan Baez, and Mount Denali. Emphatically, the author's purpose was not merely to preserve things but to choose passages that might entertain contemporary readers. Starting with 250,000 words, he gradually threw out 75 percent of them, and randomly assembled the remaining fragments into "an album quilt." Among other things, The Patch is a covert memoir.

In the quiet still hours of the evening on May 10, 1980, a young nation faced its most crucial hour. Two Cuban MiGs were dispatched by Cuba's competent authority. Their ultimate destination Cay Santo Domingo a small cay in the southern hemisphere of the Bahamas. Their intended target: HMBS Flamingo, a one-hundred-and-four-foot Bahamian patrol vessel with two Cuban fishing vessels, Ferrocemento 54 and Ferrocemento 165, in tow.The remaining hours in the afternoon will unfold a tyranny of unsettling events resulting in the tragic loss of life and property for the Bahamas. The crises plunged the region into a geopolitical crisis and set in motion a cascading set of circumstances that will affect the young nation for the rest of its existence.Final Sunset is the riveting account of the fatal sinking of HMBS Flamingo by Cuban MIGs on May 10, 1980. It recounts the harrowing tale of heroism and survivorship. The gritty and unrelenting human will to make it home after their routine day took a most unfortunate turn on one of the darkest moments in Bahamian history.

This acclaimed collection of essays begins with the title essay and a trip to Nevada, where, in the company of a brand inspector, John McPhee discovers that cattle rustling is not just history.

At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect-in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth-and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.

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 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.

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 Israelis carefully patterned their own military on the Swiss model.

The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world-a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting for a lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.

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.

Levels of the Game is John McPhee's astonishing account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968.It 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 which have molded the players' games."This may be the high point of American sports journalism"- Robert Lipsyte, The New York Times

The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion yearsTwenty 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 and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World.Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction.Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.