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  During the Thanksgiving vacation of 1992, a few friends and I took a trip from Pocatello to Sonoma, California.  There were two primary goals for the trip: first, to taste a lot of wine; and second, to visit road cuts on Interstate Highway 80 between Reno and Sacramento.  My interest in wine was a longstanding one; road cuts, on the other hand, hadn’t intrigued me until about a month before, when I had read a long, three-part article in the New Yorker entitled “Annals of the Former World: Assembling California.”  The article (which later appeared as a book) dealt with the historical geology of the state, a dry subject, one might think, but the writer made it stimulating, dramatic and somehow personal.  The author was John McPhee, who, at that time, had been a staff writer at the New Yorker for thirty years.  I realized later that I’d read a great many of his articles, on topics ranging from Bill Bradley (when he was a professional basketball player), to oranges, to canoe making, to the Merchant Marine, and I still occasionally discover that an essay that sticks in my mind after fifty years – like the one about Tabasco sauce – turns out to have been by McPhee. 

  Because McPhee included in his “Annals…” article an account of a road trip along Interstate 80 in the company of a geologist, and because he gave detailed accounts of the locations of the geologically interesting sites, especially those road cuts that best exposed the ancient history of the land along the highway, it was relatively easy to imagine driving the same route, following along with the article, and stopping where he had stopped.  And that’s exactly what we did.  It was an extraordinary trip.  No doubt the motorists roaring by on the highway found it curious that a little group of people were to be seen peering closely at a rock face, and frequently consulting a magazine and pointing.

  John McPhee has become one of the most celebrated authors of non-fiction in the United States.   He currently occupies an honorary chair in journalism at Princeton University, his alma mater, but continues to be primarily a writer.  He has published 27 books, become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, won a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and received eight honorary degrees. 

  His genre is often called “literary nonfiction,” to distinguish it from ordinary journalism.  He is both a reporter of fact, and an artful shaper of narrative employing the tools of the fiction writer.  Few writers living can compete with McPhee in making apparently mundane subjects fascinating.  In the book under review, someone is quoted as saying, “I can’t believe I read a whole book about oranges!” 

  Though he has written about a wide variety of subjects, McPhee is best known for his interest in, and accounts of, the natural world.  He has no training as a scientist, but his ability to interview scientists, conduct background research, and then communicate scientific information to the layman in a interesting and engaging way, is unsurpassed.  On environmental issues, McPhee describes himself as “neutral,” but most readers have found him to be a remarkably effective voice for the conservation movement.

  Coming into McPhee Country is the first collection of essays devoted to an analysis of the works of John McPhee.  It contains fourteen essays, and an excellent introduction by the editors.  There is a good deal of biographical information conveyed, though the focus is upon his career as a writer, and the interview with McPhee conducted by Jared Haynes is particularly interesting.  The essays are academic in character and bring to bear upon McPhee’s works current techniques of literary criticism.  The average reader will probably find these discussions rather unpalatable.   Academic libraries, however, will want to acquire this book to support English department courses dealing with nonfiction prose.  For public libraries, the book is a questionable choice, though the works of McPhee himself are all highly recommended.  To learn more about McPhee and his writings, there is a web site created by his publisher at http://www.johnmcphee.com/.