Review by New York Times Review
FOR the last 45 years, John McPhee has come out with a work of narrative nonfiction about every year and a half. The quantity impresses, but not nearly so much as the quality. McPhee has a nearly cultish following among nonfiction writers, who admire his quirky choice of subjects - often unheralded virtuosos of their own particular domain (a headmaster, a barge captain), or such intimidatingly large topics as the formation of the earth (four books on geology; collected together as "Annals of the Former World," they won a Pulitzer Prize). We envy his powers of description, the way he transforms technically complex subjects into something readers can hold in their hand and examine at close range. And, perhaps above all else, we marvel at the pains he takes with structure, approaching his subject from oblique angles, slowly building tension, sometimes seeming to wander, but always propelling his narratives forward. These are some of the things that McPhee does in his latest collection, "Silk Parachute," most of which previously appeared in The New Yorker. He makes geological analogies (like an ice sheet, lacrosse has a "spreading center"). He highlights peculiar speech (a high school coach appreciated anyone who was "innterr-esst-edd"). He violates Strunk and White ("circum allate," "penannular"). He lets both inanities (athletes' quips) and profundities (athletes' quips) stand without comment. He mocks jargon (ostrich meat is "arterially correct"). He makes long lists. Obviously, I'm a huge fan of McPhee's, but I realize not everyone feels that way. Yes, he's getting cuter with age ("In a stone wall I found an A.T.M. The wall was stuffed with euros"), but he's still sly (he quotes from "The Lacrosse History of the Boys' Latin School," "whose 83,000 words, even without being read, say a great deal about lacrosse in Baltimore") and supersubtle (inside a chalk quarry: "If you've ever been in a salt mine the place reminds you of a salt mine"). McPhee's critics say he's too admiring of his subjects, too courteous to point out the flaws that might enrich a portrait. He is among the most dispassionate of reporters, hovering around the edges of his narrative, rarely turning attention to himself, stingy with his own history, feelings and reactions. (His long preoccupation with rocks seemed only to reinforce this rap.) But in "Silk Parachute," whose topics wander from his mother to his summer camp, from unusual meals to The New Yorker's fact checkers, the authorial facade intermittently cracks. Readers hungry for details - how he developed his voice, his sensibility, his "inn-terr-esst" - will gobble up these essays. Readers who shrug, "Eh?" may simply enjoy the scope of McPhee's intellectual curiosity and his great gnashing of words ("collisional juxtapositions of magmas and metamorphics"). In "Swimming With Canoes," McPhee tells us that almost anything will panic him ("health, money, working with words"). In "Rip Van Golfer," the title says it all: it's been more than 50 years since he set foot on a golf course. Now, at the U.S. Open, a media pass allows McPhee to go anywhere, "but things seem to have changed since 1950, and I'm not sure where anywhere might be." Uncomfortable hanging out with the big shots, "sometimes I slip outside the ropes to recover my self-esteem," he writes. Tiger Woods, whom he follows for nine holes, gets three sentences; a massive oak, under which he takes shelter and remembers why he became a writer, gets three pages. In "Season on the Chalk," McPhee dotes shamelessly on his family. He introduces a grandson, who writes a graffito in "an ambitious font," and lets slip that the boy has recently won his school's form prize; when his granddaughter announces that the dinosaurs were killed by "asteroid, or volcano," he writes, "I wish she had said 'volcanism,' but what can I do? She isn't 7 yet." With the passing of the years, or simply with the passing of William Shawn, The New Yorker's scrupulous former editor, McPhee reveals a bawdier side. In "Checkpoints," about the magazine's fact-checking process, he describes being flashed by a topless siren aboard a cabin boat: "It was my experience, my description, my construction, my erection." In other words, this fact is "on author," not checkable. Too much information? Maybe. The most intimate parts of "Silk Parachute" - about McPhee's mother, his children, his youth and its passing - demonstrate a purity of expression just about unparalleled in first-person journalism. But along with these heart-rending flashes comes the occasional phrase turned a quarter rotation too far, or a sentence that defies easy comprehension. In "Spin Right and Shoot Left," world-class lacrosse players "are playing in an atmosphere that reminds you of your driver's permit." Anyone? At 59 pages, this is the least satisfying essay of the collection, perhaps because it doesn't center on a particular person. (Neither does the long piece on the U.S. Open, but its subject is the weirdness of reporting on a major sporting event rather than on golf itself.) Still, I will take McPhee any day, on any subject. If it must be lacrosse, or golf, so be it. Most readers won't mind the occasional phrase gone precious - such indulgences only set the spare, move-me-to-tears passages into higher relief. In the age of blogging and tweeting, of writers' near-constant self-promotion, McPhee is an imperative counter-weight, a paragon of both sense and civility. Elizabeth Royte is a frequent contributor to the Book Review. Her most recent book is "Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America's Drinking Water."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 21, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
This is not a new McPhee reader, though surely a third such volume is merited, but rather a collection of the best of his funny and affecting personal essays, works that offer glimpses of McPhee as a willful, curious boy; a nervous rookie New Yorker staff writer; and a bemused and proud father and grandfather. The stellar title essay is a glorious curveball homage to his mother. McPhee also writes of canoeing and lacrosse. Does eating eccentric food count as an athletic endeavor? It does when McPhee lives off the land with Euell Gibbons. And certainly fact-checking as practiced at the New Yorker (the home for earlier versions of these delectable pieces), and described in Checkpoints, qualifies as the literary equivalent of an Olympic sport. Season on the Chalk is a quintessential McPhee essay--he is a game-changing master of the form--in which the roll and pitch of his sentences embody the topography of Europe's strange and fabled chalk country. Whatever his subject, McPhee's virtuoso and deeply engaging essays convey the profound pleasure of attending to the world.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The world's complex mechanisms beguile us in this scintillating collection of essays, many from the New Yorker. McPhee is fascinated by all manner of intricate and subtle processes. His topic might be the slow geological forces that produced the chalk formations underlying the landscape of northwestern Europe or the stolid wine-making procedures of the French vineyards atop them. It might be the lightning-fast maneuvers in the sport of lacrosse or the evangelizing social networks that are spreading it across the continent. It might be the splashy tricks he and his friends performed with their canoes at summer camp, or the finicky machinery of his daughter's box camera, its long exposures rendering all moving objects invisible. It might be the New Yorker's mighty fact-checking juggernaut churning out answers to the most obscure questions, or the oddly shaped mental gears that processed editor William Shawn's legendary food phobias, or the wondrous workings of a toy silk parachute. However arcane the subject, McPhee wraps it in nicely wrought narrative and piquant characters, as when a random outing with his granddaughter sparks a discourse on theories of mass extinction. The result is a narrative that is wryly humorous, raptly observant, luxuriating in idle curiosity. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
McPhee's (Uncommon Carriers) first book on Sen. Bill Bradley was published in 1965; since then he has written 28 books that include essays and writings on Alaska, the Jersey Pine Barrens, the bark canoe, boats, trains, the Army Corp of Engineers, and, most important, geology. His individual and distinguished style, his subjects, knowledge, curiosity, humor, and interests have made him one of America's most enjoyable and intellectually wide-ranging writers. The ten essays here first appeared in The New Yorker, where McPhee has been a staff writer since 1965. He addresses his mother, his prep school headmaster, his photographer daughter Laura McPhee, canoes, lacrosse, strange foods, fact-checking, golf, and New Jersey. Especially fine is "Season on the Chalk," McPhee's description of the English downs and France's Champagne country. Verdict Ideal for McPhee fans as well as those interested in good writing and fascinating subjects.-Gene Shaw, Paramus P.L., NJ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ten gem-quality bemusements from New Yorker veteran McPhee (Uncommon Carriers, 2007, etc.). Here the author is at his most personal, far from the cool remove that has characterized so much of his superb, voluminous output. As usual, these journalistic pieces are not assignments. McPhee examines things he finds intriguing: canoeing, basketball, lacrosse, boats, schooling and magazine writing. The storiesmost of them amplified articles from the New Yorkershowcase a writer obviously enjoying himself, whether watching his grandson mucking about in the Thames estuary, where a bilge-spewing ship resembles "a floating cadaver of ulcerated rust," or detailing the work of "champagne riddling," during which "a plug as soft and repulsive as phlegm" is removed from the settling bubbly. Each subject comes with plenty of entertaining material, but also plays on the surface with an appealing glee. McPhee pays a return to golf, a sport he had abandoned many years before when he "envisioned [it] as a psychological Sing Sing in which I was an inmate," and he writes with a high degree of candor and affection about working for the New Yorkerhow an article came to pass, the ins and outs of the magazine's vaunted fact-checking department, telephone conversations with William Shawn and even times when the magazine rejected his pieces. Who'd have thought? Throughout, we feel a felicitous warmth of McPhee at work as he shares his stories. Reading these vignettes is like finding the bean in the Twelfth Night cakeeach is a surprising, rewarding delight. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
