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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
March 2010
On Sale: March 2, 2010
240 pages
ISBN: 0374263736
EAN: 9780374263737
Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE’S PROSE PIECES—IN MANY
ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES The brief, brilliant essay “Silk Parachute,” which first
appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become John
McPhee’s most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine
other pieces here— highly varied in length and theme—McPhee
ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through
lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird
foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his
reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a
season in Europe “on the chalk” from the downs and sea
cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and
the champagne country of northern France. Some of the pieces
are wholly personal. In luminous recollections of his early
years, for example, he goes on outings with his mother,
deliberately overturns canoes in a learning process at a
summer camp, and germinates a future book while riding on a
jump seat to away games as a basketball player. But each
piece—on whatever theme—contains somewhere a personal aspect
in which McPhee suggests why he was attracted to write about
the subject, and each opens like a silk parachute, lofted
skyward and suddenly blossoming with color and form.
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