A powerfully evocative photographic chronicle of the high desert of the American WestSpanning almost all of Nevada and Utah and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming, the sparsely populated regions of the Great Basin and the Basin and Range Province have stories to tell—stories intimate and vast, familial, historical, and geological. In Silence So Deep It Rings, renowned landscape photographer Laura McPhee challenges the tradition of nineteent...

"In 1969, John McPhee moved his family from New Jersey across the Atlantic to live in the land of his forefathers, the island of Colonsay – seventeen square miles of dew and damp twenty-five miles off the coast of Scotland. They rented a crofthouse, his children enrolled at the local school, and they soon were accepted into this tightly circumscribed community of 138 people.Intertwining history and legend, McPhee gives us a comprehensive portrait of this remote and misty land. He ba...

'John McPhee is celebrated in America and all but unknown in this country. The volume I love most is Coming into the Country, an account of Alaska and the Alaskans. His genius is that he can write about anything.' - Robert Macfarlane In this unforgettable and astutely observed travel account, Pulitzer Prize-winner John McPhee journeys into the wild frontiers and frigid climate of Alaska - exploring the diverse terrain of this Northern US state. Travelling by foot and canoe, helicopter and ...

McPhee is a grand master of narrative non-fiction.' – GuardianInspired by the glass of freshly-squeezed juice he bought every day on his morning commute, Pulitzer Prize-winner John McPhee takes us on an idiosyncratic and re¬markable journey in search of the world's most popular fruit.With his trademark style and enchanting wit, he unravels the rich history and fas¬cinating cultivation of this botanical marvel. Beginning with the fruit's origins in Southeast Asia, McP...

Most people think of the American state of New Jersey as a suburban-industrial corridor that sits just west of New York City. But in the centre of the state lies a vast wilderness – larger than most national parks – which has been known since the seventeenth century as the Pine Barrens. The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acidic for farming. But below its soil rests a 17 trillion gal...

A literary legend’s engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design.In Tab...

The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacherDraft No. 4 is a master class on the writer’s craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, dic...

**A master chronicler of American life introduces us to the iconic and most curious American shad.A pithy, humorous, and illuminating standalone extract from John McPhee’s twenty-sixth book, The Founding Fish.**McPhee, himself a shad fisherman, recounts the fascinating life and ways of this great American wayfarer, most famous for its Odyssean journey as it leaves the ocean in crowds of millions, running heroic distances up America’s rivers to spawn.McPhee ...

In Greenville, New Hampshire, a small town in the southern part of the state, Henri Vaillancourt makes birch-bark canoes in the same manner and with the same tools that the Indians used. The Survival of the Bark Canoe is the story of this ancient craft and of a 150-mile trip through the Maine woods in those graceful survivors of a prehistoric technology. It is a book squarely in the tradition of one written by the first tourist in these woods, Henry David Thoreau, whose The Ma...

Updated and expanded for its 20th anniversary, Camp is former Disney CEO Michael Eisner's coming-of-age story about his time in camp and how the indispensable lessons he learned there continue to influence him in business and in life.Over the years, as a camper and a counselor, Michael Eisner absorbed the life lessons that come from sitting in the stern of a canoe or gathering around a campfire at night. In this deeply personal memoir, he recounts his exper...

The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.

“Deep time” is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in par...