misconduct corruption headmaster expedition

books:

6 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1992

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 ...

The Control of Nature

28 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1994

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 ...

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 ...

Sacre Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec

16 reviews
Taras Grescoe

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2001

Outstanding Overview of Quebec
For those with more than a casual interest in what the province of Quebec is all about, this book by multilingual Canadian journalist Grescoe is an excellent, evenhanded place to start. The twelve chapters do an admirable job of untangling the complicated web of ethnic, linguistic, political, and religious identities that make up Quebec. Grescoe gets things off to a quick start in the first ...

The Survival of the Bark Canoe

10 reviews
John McPhee

MacFarlane Walter & Ross, 1991

Thoreau and Beyond
I read this book years ago and have even given a couple of copies away to friends! So I highly recommend this book and many of McPhee's other works. As to Henri Vaillincourt, the hero of the book; he would say don't believe everything you read in the book... He builds canoes still today, and very nice one at that. He even has a website that I will not list here. The true beauty of the book is ...

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. ...

Game Misconduct: Alan Eagleson and the Corruption of Hockey

8 reviews
Russ Conway

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1997

A Gut Wrenching Account of
This is one of the most important sports books ever written. Through his exhaustive work, Russ Conway exposes the greed, corruption and financial swindling that plagued the NHL throughout Alan Eagelson's reign of terror and the financial and emotional price that so many players faced. Most importantly, Conway's work served as the catalyst for Mr. Eagleson's downfall and proving many player's ...

A Sense of Where You Are

10 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1992

An elegant look at the game of basketball.
I'm writing this review because the fact that it didn't have a 5-star rating irritated me. I first saw the McPhee/Bill Bradley piece in the New Yorker Magazine about 30 years ago. After reading it I xeroxed the entire article and sent copies of it to every member of the University of South Carolina basketball team (which for those of you who are as old as I am was coached by the legendary Frank ...

Rising from the Plains (Paperback)

12 reviews
John McPhee

MacFarlane Walter & Ross, 1991

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 ...

The Pine Barrens

24 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1992

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 ...

Pieces of the Frame

2 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1992

Pieces of the Frame, John McPhee
The always excellent McPhee gives us a collection of short pieces on a wide variety of subjects, including the monsters and whisky and Macbeths of Scotland, playing basketball and tennis in England, racing horses, paddling canoes, and several more. My favorite is "The Search for Marvin Gardens," an examination of the famous game Monopoly from two perspectives. As McPhee plays several games of ...

The Curve of Binding Energy

16 reviews
John McPhee

MacFarlane Walter & Ross, 1994

Great Info on Nukes
The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee is just a terrific read for anyone interested in the twin topics of nuclear energy and the nuclear bomb. We've all read stories about the negative environmental effects of storing used nuclear fuel, but you rarely are made aware of the other negative externality of used nuclear fuel; the threat to national security. In this quickly-read, reportorial ...

In Suspect Terrain

8 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1991

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 ...

Oranges

20 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1991

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 ...

The Dinosaur Project: The Story of the Greatest Dinosaur Expedition Ever Mounted

2 reviews
Wayne Grady

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1993

Grady's narrative style brings the reader along
The book The Dinosaur Project, by Wayne Grady, describes the joint Canadian and Chinese paleontological project starting in 1985. During the course of this project, Canadian researchers worked alongside Chinese researchers in the paleontological cornucopia of the Gobi Desert, as well as Chinese workers working with Canadians in the also fruitful Southern Alberta Badlands and the Canadian High ...

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

4 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1992

For a sense of wonder and anticipation that stays with you
This is the first McPhee book I ever read-- way back when it first came out. How well I remember it! How many years I have continued to look for news of the needed technology for large scale commercial use of lighter than air craft finally being mastered (and we still seem on the brink of making it work). A bookstore clerk had told me as I picked up the book, "That is one strange book. We ...

The Ark in the Garden: Fables for Our Times

1 review

MacFarlane Walter & Ross, 1998

Why should kids have all the fun?
This is a terrific series of fables written by famous contemporary Canadian authors. Like children's fables, they are mostly a vehicle for the authors to moralize... in this case about the state of the country. Quebec separatists, the Tory Ontario government, and the general trend towards government cutbacks all provide fodder for stories by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, ...

Looking for a Ship

13 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1990

A bittersweet experience....
I think I was born wanting to go to sea. I had never even seen an ocean as a kid, but I instinctually seemed to have a knowlege and a love of ships and the sea. As I grew older it puzzled me that the Merchant Marine wasn't considered a viable career choice. It also puzzled me that I never met anyone who had worked in the merchant service later than the early 50's. There was also the fact that the ...

The John McPhee Reader

2 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1990

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 Headmaster.

11 reviews
John McPhee

Macfarlane, Walter & Ross 1992, 1992

A Teacher for the generations
From 1902 to 1968, Frank Boyden was the Headmaster of Deerfield, a private boy's school in the countryside of Massachusetts. When Boyden arrived, the school had 14 students, transportation was by foot or horse drawn wagon, and he intended to stay only long enough to get enough money. 66 years later, Deerfield was one of the leading prep schools in America, the equal to Exeter and Andover. Best ...

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