John McPhee
John McPhee
John Angus McPheeis an American writer, widely considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World. In 2008 he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career."...
ocean moving writing
When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.
against along attention beneath calling elevated five goes guide happen hundred materials miles orleans press ring river serious sink swing tend
The river goes through New Orleans like an elevated highway. ...Among the five hundred miles of levee deficiencies now calling for attention along the Mississippi River, the most serious happen to be in New Orleans...the levees tend to sink as well. They press down on the muck beneath them and squirt materials out to the sides...The guide levees, ring levees, spillways and floodways that dangle and swing from Old River are here because people, against odds, willed them to be here.
against along attention beneath calling elevated five goes guide happen hundred materials miles orleans press ring river serious sink swing tend
The river goes through New Orleans like an elevated highway, ... ...Among the five hundred miles of levee deficiencies now calling for attention along the Mississippi River, the most serious happen to be in New Orleans...the levees tend to sink as well. They press down on the muck beneath them and squirt materials out to the sides...The guide levees, ring levees, spillways and floodways that dangle and swing from Old River are here because people, against odds, willed them to be here.
air recipe rich verse
A tympanic resonance, so rich and overpowering that it could give an air of verse to a recipe for stewed hare.
gain head stopped today
A pedestrian today in Juneau, head down and charging, can be stopped for no gain by the wind.
behind player tennis
Behind every tennis player there is another tennis player
airplane class paper
I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes.
marine limestone summit
The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.
age reason dave
He (Dave Brower) is an emotionalist in an age of dangerous reason.
horse thinking race
A quarter-horse jockey learns to think of a twenty-second race as if it were occurring across twenty minutes--in distinct parts, spaced in his consciousness. Each nuance of the ride comes to him as he builds his race. If you can do the opposite with deep time, living in it and thinking in it until the large numbers settle into place, you can sense how swiftly the initial earth packed itself together, how swiftly continents have assembled and come apart, how far and rapidly continents travel, how quickly mountains rise and how quickly they disintegrate and disappear.
morning nonfiction hell
Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning.
doctors sound stethoscope
The doctor listens in with a stethoscope and hears sounds of a warpath Indian drum.
letters action inventing
He liked to go from A to B without inventing letters between.
thinking race sky
On the geological time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about deep time. ... Geologists ... see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the Earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s across the sky ... Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death.