Word: mcphee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...JOHN McPHEE and ALFRED EISENSTAEDT...
About oranges and ecology-subjects on which he has also written-critical opinion of John McPhee may be divided. But he is by far the best tennis writer ever, and this illustrated book demonstrates that skill nearly as well as McPhee's earlier book, Levels of the Game. That classic turned Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner into the Hector and Achilles of a center-court Trojan War, and left readers as absorbed, and exhausted, as if they had just sweated and stroked and prayed their way through a lifetime of championship tennis...
This time McPhee splendidly records the sights and inhabits the psyches of a dozen or so great players at key moments during the 1970 matches at Wimbledon. His triumph, though, is a portrait of Robert Twynam, senior groundsman, who for years has exhorted the Wimbledon grass to grow, almost blade by blade. For Twynam, the empyrean racket men of the age are mainly classified as "toe-draggers, sliders or choppers," in relation to how their profane tennis shoes carve up England's most pruned and perfect piece of greensward...
Alfred Eisenstaedt's photographs are fine, but it is unfortunate he did not cover the same Wimbledon year that McPhee describes...
...haired druid, ecologist and outdoorsman who guided the Sierra Club during its rise to national prominence as a scourge of dam builders and redwood cutters, is the subject. The glitter in such a man's eyes can make it difficult to get a clear look at him, but McPhee had the happy notion of confronting Brower with three of his ideological enemies on threatened terrain-Glacier Peak Wilderness in the state of Washington, Georgia's Cumberland Island and finally, on a raft trip down the Colorado River. In the process Brower and his antagonists are revealed as subtly...