The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Monte Davis:

Just one quibble, not meant pedantically, on the use of "essays" for McPhee's work. Based on a few of his talks I've attended, I think he'd much prefer "reporting" -- and that matters. Yes, the essayist's freedom and felicity of association is there, but there's also a deep, strong skeleton of listening hard to people who really know basketball or citrus culture or plate tectonics, and working hard to make sense of it for the reader. In that "dream" Abi quotes, the whimsy is just a skin: there's a lot of finely articulated modeling of geological processes going on.

I've been rereading Annals of the Former World, the 1998 compilation and expansion of McPhee's four 1980s books on North American geology. This is one of my favorite passages; see also the brilliant set piece, pp. 608-620, on the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989.

The rereading was prompted by recent drives through northern California and the west coast of Oregon, when I realized how deeply McPhee had influenced my "reading" of landscapes and what shapes them. He's one of the best expository writers of the last half-century.

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