Tabula Rasa
Volume 1
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A literary legend’s engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.
Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design.
In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to—people to profile, regions he meant to portray. There are so many examples that he plans to go on writing these vignettes, an ideal project for an old man, he says, and a “reminiscent montage” from a writing life. This first volume includes, among other things, glimpses of a frosty encounter with Thornton Wilder, interrogative dinners with Henry Luce, the allure of western Spain, criteria in writing about science, fireworks over the East River as seen from Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, the evolving inclinations of the Tower of Pisa, the islands among the river deltas of central California, teaching in a pandemic, and persuading The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. The result is a fresh survey of McPhee’s singular planet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this solid collection, McPhee (The Patch), a New Yorker staff writer since 1965, describes "in capsule form the many writing projects that I have conceived and seriously planned across the years but have never written." The 51 brief pieces stick to the Pulitzer winner's signature mix of personal reflection and observational journalism, touching on his recollections of visiting Extremadura (an "autonomous community" in Spain that was the birthplace of many conquistadors, including Hernando de Soto and Hernán Cortés), stumbling into a professorship at Princeton's fledgling journalism program in 1975, and road-tripping from Maryland to Ohio with his daughters. Several dispatches meditate on the 92-year-old author's mortality, as when he discusses abandoning his plan to write "about a 25,000-cow dairy farm in Indiana" to instead compile this volume, which he suggests is an "old-man project" intended to keep him active. Standout selections consider the "neologymnasts" in the pharmaceutical industry who rebrand generic medications, the construction of the leaning tower of Pisa, and the creative pieces of nonfiction writing his students came up with during Covid-19 lockdown. McPhee's gift for language is on full display (he calls Vermont and New Hampshire "two goat legs reversed for packaging"), but the unfinished snippets will likely hold the greatest appeal for the author's most ardent admirers, who will enjoy the intimate look inside his process. It's a revealing compendium of curios from a first-rate writer.
