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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 Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to--people to profile, regions he meant to portray. There are so many examples that he plans to go on writing these vignettes, an ideal project for an old man, he says, and a "reminiscent montage" from a writing life. This first volume includes, among other things, glimpses of a frosty encounter with Thornton Wilder, interrogative dinners with Henry Luce, the allure of western Spain, criteria in writing about science, fireworks over the East River as seen from Malcolm Forbes's yacht, the evolving inclinations of the Tower of Pisa, the islands among the river deltas of central California, teaching in a pandemic, and persuading The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. The result is a fresh survey of McPhee's singular planet.… (more)
User reviews
[Tabula Rasa, Volume 1] published this year (2023), is a review of many article ideas he's considered in his 50-year career. Things he intended to research and write, but failed to follow through on. It is a potpourri, and at least for me, was entertaining throughout.
When I was in my prime, I planned to write about a dairy farm in Indiana with twenty-five thousand cows. Now, taking my cue from George Bush, Thornton Wilder, and countless others who stayed hale doing old-person projects I am writing about not writing about the dairy farm with twenty-five thousand cows...I decided to describe many such saved-up, bypassed, intended pieces of writing as an old-man project of my own. [McPhee is 92.]
The book is not entirely an account of pieces that died aborning. For example, Princeton is never far from his mind. McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, attended public school there, and rolled directly into Princeton University, where his father was physician to all the sports teams. He has a short piece about being, right out of high school, a night watchman at the site of the Institute of Advanced Studies (think Einstein. Oppenheimer. Von Neumann.) He has memories of faculty like Joe Brown, a former boxer, coach of the college's boxing team, and a sculptor; an adolescent McPhee took advantage of an unlockable window to sneak into the sculpture studio to swipe modeling clay. Then he got caught.
Of course, his subjects include fishing, walking, geology. He comments on Woodrow Wilson's belated fall from grace as his racism emerged.
First rate from front to back.