Word: mcphee
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...agony of deciding whether to leave the city for the country, and upon leaving, when to return. Nowadays the tension of two homes is stock-in-trade for the essayist, though few display the pertinacious ease and delight with acquired folkways that distinguish both Hoagland and his counterpart, John McPhee...
...staff writer for The New Yorker, McPhee has straddled two worlds in scores of articles and more than a dozen books. Best known for his non-fiction study of Alaska, Coming into the Country, McPhee has also tangled with long, discursive pieces about the higher levels of tennis, the craft of bark canoe builders, missing links in the technology of nuclear waste disposal. McPhee is an adventurer of information, a stickler for the facts. He has written a book about oranges, a most studious and exacting survey that would do justice to Montaigne in its recognition of fundamental cravings. Typically...
...great Otto flap caused almost as much consternation as the 1926 disappearance of Agatha Christie did in London. None of the professional eaters-out knew who Otto might be or where. Reporters pumped other reporters, chefs, food authors, anyone who might draw a bead on the wayward cuisinier. McPhee was besieged by calls; so was The New Yorker, which did not, in fact, know Otto's identity. The Washington Post published several guesses-one was correct-but did not pursue the story...
Mimi Sheraton, 53, the New York Times's remorseless food critic, and Frank Prial, 48, who writes about wine for the paper, deduced that Otto's place would most likely be fairly near McPhee's home in Princeton, N.J. They sicced a stringer onto the story, says Prial. "He called politicians in the area, figuring they like to eat, too." Indeed. The gastronomic gumshoe tracked down a Pike County Republican bigwig who confirmed the team's suspicion that the bistro described in The New Yorker was the Red Fox Inn, in Milford, Pa. However, the legendary...
...Yorker Editor William Shawn, 71-who eats faithfully at the Algonquin -maintains: "I look at McPhee's profile as a beautifully written literary piece, constructed on facts but still a literary piece." He has "no regrets." Nor does John McPhee. "The only reaction I might have," he says, "would be to the shocks we caused, and wonder over the results...