The Control of Nature

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The Control of Nature (eBook) Pub. Date: 4/1/2011 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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The Control of Nature (Reprint) Pub. Date: 9/1/1990 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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The Control of Nature Pub. Date: 10/1/1999 Publisher: Gale Group

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Control of Nature (1st ed) Pub. Date: 8/16/1989 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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The Control of Nature Pub. Date: 7/1/1992 Publisher: Random House Adult Trade Publishing Group

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Overview

The Control of Nature is John McPhee's bestselling account of places where people are locked in combat with nature. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strageties and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking is his depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those attempting to wrest control from her - stubborn, sometimes foolhardy, more often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

McPhee's bestselling account of places where people are locked into contested territories, The Control of Nature examines in detail the strategies and tactics through which people attmept to control their natural surroundings.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Man vs. Nature, sometimes it is difficult to tell which is winning: in Louisiana, engineers struggle to keep the Mississippi River on course; in Iceland, people once blocked a flow of lava that threatened to destroy a major harbor; in Southern California, the fight goes on to secure houses against rock- and mudslides. The incomparable McPhee ( Basin and Range , etc.) takes us to these battlefields, introducing the challengers and describing the circumstances at the front. He reviews the history of attempts to control the lower Mississippi, where Nature has eventually won. McPhee's account of the volcanic eruption in Iceland is vivid and dramatic--we feel our feet growing hot from the lava. And his report on the Los Angeles mudslides is nightmarish in detail. Despite the ingenious solutions (or deterrents) found to these problems, the reader is left with the feeling that Nature will triumph once more. These pieces are reprinted from the New Yorker. (June)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780374522599
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: 9/1/1990
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 200,365
Product dimensions: 5.48 (w) x 8.26 (h) x 0.77 (d)

Meet the Author

John McPhee

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Biography

"John McPhee ought to be a bore," The Christian Science Monitor once observed. "With a bore's persistence he seizes a subject, shakes loose a cloud of more detail than we ever imagined we would care to hear on any subject -- yet somehow he makes the whole procedure curiously fascinating."

This is his specialty. A New Yorker writer hired in 1965 by another devil-is-in-the-details disciple, William Shawn, McPhee has taken full advantage of the magazine's commitment to long, unusual pieces and became one of the practitioners of so-called "literary journalism," joining a fraternity occupied by Tom Wolfe, Tracey Kidder, and Joan Didion. He hung on during the Tina Brown days, when the marching orders were for short and topical pieces. And the magazine's current editor, David Remnick, was once a student of McPhee's annual writing seminar at Princeton University.

The temptation is to brand McPhee a nature writer, since he spends so much of his professional life trekking through the outdoors or scribbling notes in the passenger seat of a game warden's pickup truck. But his writing isn't so easily labeled as that. Instead, he has the luxury of writing about whatever strikes his fancy, oftentimes plumbing childhood passions. In fact, his big break as a professional writer combined two of his favorite things: sports and Princeton, his home since birth. In 1965, he finally got published by The New Yorker with a profile on Princeton basketball star Bill Bradley. The piece later became his first book.

He wrote for the television program Robert Montgomery Presents in the late 1950s and was on staff at Time in the ‘50s and ‘60s, frequently pitching pieces to his dream publication,The New Yorker. That particular success eluded him until Shawn picked up the Bradley piece and then spent hours with him editing the piece the night the magazine was going to press. In a 1997 interview with Newsday, McPhee recalled that experience: "I said to him, 'This whole enterprise is going on and you're sitting here talking to me about this comma. How do you do it?' And he said, 'It takes as long as it takes.' That's the greatest answer I ever heard."

The same might be said of McPhee himself. He has written what, for many, is the definitive book on Alaska, Coming into the Country. "With this book,The New York Times said, "McPhee proves to be the most versatile journalist in America." He spent 696 pages on the geological development of North America in Annals of the Former World. He explored man's battle to tame mudslides and lava flows in The Control of Nature. He considered the birch-bark canoe in The Survival of the Bark Canoe. He caused a bit of head-scratching over the topic of his 17th book, La Place de la Concorde Suisse: the Swiss army.

The itinerary, at first blush, might not always be compelling, but in McPhee's hands, the journey is its own reward.

"Mr. McPhee is a writer's writer -- a master craftsman whom many aspirants study," The Wall Street Journal said in 1989. "For one thing, he has an engaging, distinctive voice. It is warm, understated and wry. Within a paragraph or two, he takes us into his company and makes us feel we're on an outing with an old chum. A talky old chum, to be sure, with an occasional tendency to corniness and rambling, but a cherished one nevertheless. We read his books not so much because we're thirsty for information about canoes, but because it's worth tagging along on any literary journey Mr. McPhee feels like taking."

Good To Know

The son of a doctor, McPhee credits his love of the outdoors to the 13 summers he spent at Camp Keewaydin, where his father was the camp physician.

His devotion to the perfect sentence came from a high school English teacher who assigned her students three compositions a week, an assignment that included an outline defending the composition's structure.

Bill Bradley made McPhee his daughter's godfather.

1. Also Known As:
  
  John A. McPhee
2. Hometown:
  
  Princeton, New Jersey
1. Date of Birth:
  
  March 8, 1931
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Princeton, New Jersey
1. Education:
  
  A.B., Princeton University, 1953; graduate study at Cambridge University, 1953-54
2. Website:
  
  http://www.johnmcphee.com/

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