Word: mcphee
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...world is just around the corner. Many people derive cozy feelings from this notion of a shrinking globe. But in others, the concept gives rise to claustrophobia. They need a planet that still holds inaccessible places, both beautiful and stubbornly impervious to the designs of man. Author John McPhee has good news for these true believers. He has discovered such a place, and this book is his report...
Coming into the Country is actually three lengthy bulletins about Alaska, glued together like aerial reconnaissance photographs. The first describes a canoe trip that McPhee and four companions took down an unspoiled river in the northwestern reaches of the state, well above the Arctic Circle. Second, McPhee tells of a helicopter ride with a committee looking for a site on which to build a new state capital. The last and longest section covers some wintry months spent in Eagle, a tiny settlement on the Yukon River just west of the Canadian border-"a community deeply compressed in its own isolation...
...McPhee was clearly awed by what he encountered in Alaska ("It is in no way an extension of what I've known before"), and his stories strive not to dictate that response but to duplicate it. Rather than stepping smartly from A to Z, his plots tend to pick up casually with N and then meander back around to M. The apparent informality is a ruse. McPhee consistently works like a reverse pickpocket, slipping facts deftly and painlessly into the folds of his narrative: "There are nearly twice as many people in the District of Columbia as there...
...Alaska runs off the edge of the imagination," McPhee writes, and he relies on attentive reportorial methods to keep himself and his story firmly planted on the icy ground. He carefully provides the dimensions of the Yukon River cabins he visits, often numbering and describing the items of furniture in them. He lists some 30 uses that Alaskans have found for 55-gal. drums, describes how contemporary miners pan for gold and tells how to operate a dog sled up a hill. The dozens of Alaskans he sought out and listened to come trailing clouds of particulars. McPhee can capture...
...from grounding McPhee's book, all this luggage helps it soar. Those who think they know quite enough, thank you, about Alaska are wrong. Not only is the area one of the last and largest stretches of true wilderness left on earth (and hence of atavistic concern); it is also the arena where the last act in a long American drama is being played out. McPhee characterizes the struggle as "the Dallas scenario versus the Sierra Club syndrome"-developers versus conservationists, with many conflicting interests between them. McPhee is no reflexive ecologist; he compares the Trans-Alaska Pipeline...