archdruid encounters california assembling

books:

21 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994

The Prose of Rock and Faultlines
With a precision of language and detail, John McPhee brilliantly evokes the terrain of earthquakes, desert, mountains, and coastline of California. McPhee's guide through the geological history and present-day is Eldridge Moores, a geological professor at UC/Davis who knows the land of California perhaps better than anyone and who can "see through the topography and see how the rocks lie in ...

Coming Into the Country

26 reviews
John McPhee

Bantam Books, 1982

Gets better with each read!
We bought this book in Nome, Alaska on a visit there in 2001 (my brother owns a flying service there). I took my time reading it the first time. Coming into the Country is not a book to be read quickly, but, rather, one to be savored, taking time for the details to seep into the crevices of one's memory until they become part of one's knowledge base. Every page holds a vast amount of information ...

The Crofter and the Laird (BOT #2793)

6 reviews
John McPhee

Books on Tape, 1991

Excellent early McPhee
The finely detailed observations and vivid turn-of-words which we have come to know so well from McPhee's books on North America and its geological history, is applied here with great skill in this look at the tiny Scottish island of Colonsay and its inhabitants. The small population of under 150 people can trace ancestry to two castes or clans. Most are crofters or farmers. Some are true ...

No Ordinary Land: Encounters in a Changing Environment

3 reviews
Virginia Beahan, Laura McPhee

Aperture, 1998

Hauntingly beautiful; redefines landscape photography for me
The photos of this book have the technical excellence of Ansel Adams pictures (except they are not B+W). But they are not vistas of pristine, pretty National parks that Adams shot; here the hand of man is all too present.

Encounters with the Archdruid

34 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977

McPhee's Best Work - Still Relevant Today
I read this book for the first time 36 years after it was written, yet it seems like it was written today. The battles now have different names but the perspectives are still the same. My conclusion after reading it is that as a species human's have the capacity to view the same scenery and information and come to radically different conclusions; lets build on it or lets preserve it. The ...

The Control of Nature

28 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990

People's Efforts, People's Errors
McPhee examines three recent attempts by man to alter natural changes on the surface of the planet. The first is the Corps of Engineers attempt to control of the flow and course of the Mississippi as it heads, with ever increasing power, toward New Orleans, or Texas if it had its way. And if you think that there was not some early warning of eventual problems in New Orleans, note that this book ...

Annals of the Former World

55 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

Pure Pleasure
Writing East to West, McPhee released "In Suspect Terrain" when Plate Tectonic theory was still somewhat speculative. "Rising From the Plain', in which he owes a great debt (which he acknowleges) to David Love's mother's journal brings us to the Rockies, and is perhaps his most beautiful book. "Basin and Range" is entertaining, and goes well with "Beyond The 100th Meridian" or "Desert Solitare". ...

La Place De La Concorde Suisse~John Mcphee

14 reviews
John Mcphee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1994

A faithful rendition of the Swiss military tradition
In German, La Place de la Concorde Suisse is rendered Concordiaplatz, and it is visible from the Jungfraujoch, which means "virgin saddle," and which is reached via funicular railway from Interlaken. Depending upon the season, one can either hike or ski from the Jungfraujoch down the Aletsch glacier to Concordiaplatz and view the redoubt containing the sunken armory described in McPhee's book. ...

Uncommon Carriers

27 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006

Commonly, and Exceptionally - McPhee
I've read (and own hardcovers of) every book John McPhee has written. Many of the essay/compliation books - like this one - were first largely included in The New Yorker, but I'll always rush out and buy any new McPhee when it hits the bookstores. As a trained and licensed deep-sea Merchant Mariner, several of the ship-driving stories in this book were particularly interesting to me, but I got ...

Oranges

19 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975

Orange you glad he started it all?
It's forty years now since this brilliant little mandarin of a book appeared. Early reviewers (and readers of McPhee in the New Yorker) were amused and even a bit ill-at-ease at the entertainment that the author squeezed from a subject as apparently banal as oranges. Fruit, after all, is hardly a subject for serious discourse and therefore must not be a subject for serious readers. But it was ...

LEVELS OF THE GAME

6 reviews
John McPhee

MacFarlane Walter & Ross, 1993

a real pinnacle in Sports writing
Ostensibly this book is about a tennis match, Arthur Ashe versus Clark Graebner in the 1968 US Open Semifinals. The match was historic in itself: "It has been thirteen years since an American won the men's-singles final at Forest Hills, and this match will determine whether Ashe or Graebner is to have a chance to be the first American since Tony Trabert to win it all. Ashe and ...

The Founding Fish

34 reviews
John McPhee

Amazon Remainders Account, 2002

The Founding Fish
This book is a classic about the American Shad. It covers fishing for shad, it''s biology, it's life cycle; just about everything about shad is in the book. Exciting to read and very informative. It's only deficiency is that it is not indexed- Joe Zaientz, Haddam Shad Museum.

The John McPhee Reader

2 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982

Walking Around
In this collection, a distillation taken from his many books, John McPhee describes a premier basketball player, Bill Bradley. Also featured is his, McPhee's, headmaster, Frank Boyden, of Deerfield Academy. Boyden practiced a form of management by walking around. McPhee tells of the famed oranges of Indian River, Florida. Florida was the only wilderness in the world that attracted ...

The Curve of Binding Energy: A Journey into the Awesome and Alarming World of Theodore B. Taylor

14 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994

Nuclear Bombs for Dummies
Theodore B. Taylor, the physicist who was the subject of this book died in 2004, but not before he had completed his spiritual journey from nuclear bomb maker to nuclear protester. Even though the text of this book originally appeared in "The New Yorker" in 1973, Taylor was still driven to publish his own works on the dangers of nuclear proliferation. McPhee has a very understated style ("just ...

Rising From The Plains

12 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987

A fascinating tour of Wyoming through the geological ages
I'm not a slow reader, but I rarely read a book in the same 24 hours. This one was an exception. I was immediately drawn in (and by a subject that is not of more than general interest to me), and I more or less did not put the book down until I'd read to the last page. As a teacher, I'm first of all impressed by how McPhee makes an academic and scientific subject (geology) not just interesting ...

Basin and Range

15 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982

GREAT BOOK- BASIN AND RANGE
John McPhee's Basin and Range kept me wanting to read more, right up to the very end. His style was very interesting, keeping his story on basin and range full of knowledge. He describes two of North America's past basin and range provinces. An ancient one which was once along America's eastern seaboard and the active basin and range which is centered in Nevada. Even for those who are not ...

In Suspect Terrain

8 reviews
John McPhee

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984

McPhee can even make Anita Harris interesting
McPhee can do it all: explain a complex scientific concept in clean, clear prose; perfectly divine and express the poetic nature underlying seemingly mundane geologic features; conjure up vivid panoramas of worlds lost deep in geologic time; and, no less amazingly, make us actually believe that we even personally like the brilliant, but crass, Doctor Anita Harris! Like Basin and Range, and La ...

The Pine Barrens

24 reviews
John McPhee, Bill Curtsinger

Farrar Straus & Giroux (T), 1981

Another Treasure from McPhee
This time John McPhee turns his hand to one of those anomalous natural treasures that has survived in spite of intense urbanization. The Pine Barrens are two-thirds of a million acres-an area the size of Yosemite that sit beside a major artery of the most developed region in the country. With the New Jersey Turnpike to the west and bustling, chintzy Atlantic City to the East, it's hard ...

search for books
archdruid, assembling, california, encounters, environment

Impressum / about us