Word: mcphee
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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McGinnis's idea is not totally original; the New Yorker's John McPhee, perhaps the most highly-praised non-fiction writer in America, travelled above the Arctic circle to find the subject matter for Coming Into the Country, his account of the Alaskan wilderness. There have been others, but McPhee was the most notable. His account was of the wild North and the wild people who lived there, full of mines and surveyors and lumberjacks and fishermen and bears...
...somehow, the older, tamer forests of the Berkshires and the Adirondacks suit McPhee better than the wild barren extremities of the 49th state, America's last frontier. McPhee is too much the Princetonian descendant of the painstaking Yankee silversmith. He crafts nice pieces for nice people to read in their nice New Yorkers when they're through looking at the cartoons, inferring polite, understated meanings with a precise style and weightless control. But one knows his Alaska is an idealized one to read about in front of the fire on a cold Greenwich, Conn. night accompanied by 12-year...
INTUITION and instinot seem to have little place in McPhee's writing; McPhee is the ultimate McPhee hero, the quintessential craftsman, who uses his tools so well that he leaves almost no mark on the surfaces he touches. His work is not blemished with the bubbly acne of pain or turmoil; he knows that to address anything too close to the core will mean unsightly mess. He is too polite, too squeamish, or maybe too lazy to examine the innards, to ask his subjects to puke their guts out so he can poke around in them a little. Studs Terkel...
Wonderfully readable prose is rare enough that McPhee's flaws would be only regrettable save for the few flashes of insight he does show, glimmerings of the power and potential that lie below his surface. Seemingly, McPhee's deepest feelings are for the woods, streams and mountains of America-at any rate, The Pine Barrens and Coming Into the Country, an Alaskan saga, are his two finest books. In Giving Good Weight, midway through an account of a canoe trip on which he was accompanied by boatloads of wealthy Harvardians, McPhee shows his understanding of his own mood...
...people need a shallow writer to chronicle their exploits. More likely, though, there are very few shallow people, at least shallow and interesting people. More than likely, it is the writer's attempts that are too superficial, not his subject's lives and thoughts. There is nothing rotten in McPhee, nothing that is decaying or growing or taking Valium. There is no shortage of gift, only, perhaps, of will, for to look honestly and deeply at himself and at others will prove more painful than the labor to which McPhee is accustomed. But contented mediocrity hides not only hurt...