Silk Parachute
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
