John McPhee

McPhee's books are about real people in real places. Over the past eight years, McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. This 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. He attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the...

Coming into the Country is an unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans. It is a rich tapestry of vivid characters, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of the bush. Readers of McPhee's earlier books will not be unprepared for his surprising shifts of scene and ordering of events, brilliantly combined into...

In this collection John McPhee once again, proves himself as a master observer of all arenas of life as well a powerful and important writer.

"The Patch" is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master John McPhee, all of them published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is divided into two parts. The first, "The Sporting Scene, " offers previously uncollected pieces on fishing, football, golf, and lacrosse, among other topics. They range from fly-casting for chain pickerel in the fall in New Hampshire to walking the linksland of St. Andrews at a British Open chamionship. The...

The Founding Fish is the shad, and John McPhee's veneration for it is both scientific and culinary. McPhee was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. Noted for his accessible and perceptive studies of the physical world, he weaves together strands of personal, natural, and national history in this absorbing study that traces the shad's importance from the 17th century to his family's dinner table.

To geologists, rocks are beautiful, roadcuts are windowpanes, and the earth is alive-a work in progress. The cataclysmic movement that gives birth to mountains and oceans is ongoing and can still be seen at certain places on our planet. One of these is the Basin and Range region centered in Nevada and Utah. In this first book of a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, the author crosses the spectacular Basin and Range with geology professor Kenneth Deffeyes...

A classic of reportage, Oranges was first conceived as a magazine article, but John McPhee kept encountering so much irresistible information that he wrote a book. It is perhaps the last word on the subject (the first came in 500 BC and is attributed to Confucius). McPhee writes about the botany, history, and industry of oranges, from the great orangeries of European monarchs to a fascinating profile of Ben Hill Griffin of Frostproof, Florida, who...

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Pomological Watercolor Collection contains 7,584 watercolor paintings of cultivated fruit and nut varieties, alongside speciments gathered around the world and introduced by USDA plant explorers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These remarkable, botanically accurate watercolors were painted by twenty-one professional artists (including ten women) employed by the USDA between 1886 and 1942. Produced...