John McPhee

"An "album quilt," an artful assortment of nonfiction writings by John McPhee that have not previously appeared in any book" --

The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.

Profiles include: Thomas P. F. Hoving, art historian, sometime political influence, former floorwalker; the late Euell Gibbons, famous forager of edible wild plants and author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus; Carroll Brewster of the intrepid team of M.I.T. Fellows, in the Sudan; Robert Twynam, tender of the lawn at Wimbledon; and Temple Fielding, mercurial and influential author of the popular travel guides to Europe.

McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

"Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross-section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with." "Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a many-layered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it, guided by twenty-five new maps and the "Narrative Table of Contents" (an essay outlining the history and structure of the project). Read sequentially, the book is an organic succession of set pieces, flashbacks, biographical sketches, and histories of the human and lithic kind; approached systematically, it can be a North American geology primer, an exploration of plate tectonics, or a study of geologic time and the development of the time scale."--BOOK JACKET.

McPhee writes about the botany, history, and industry of oranges.

A profile of Bill Bradley during Bradley's senior year at Princeton University [More from Wikipedia]

Theodore Taylor was one of the most brilliant engineers of the nuclear age, but in his later years he became concerned with the possibility of an individual being able to construct a weapon of mass destruction on their own. McPhee tours American nuclear institutions with Taylor and shows us how close we are to terrorist attacks employing homemade nuclear weaponry.