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More About This Textbook
Overview
From a Swedish hotel made of ice to the enigma of UFOs, from a tragedy on Lake Minnetonka to the gold mine of cyberpornography, The Princeton Reader brings together more than 90 favorite essays by 75 distinguished writers. This collection of nonfiction pieces by journalists who have held the Ferris/McGraw/Robbins professorships at Princeton University offers a feast of ideas, emotions, and experiences—political and personal, light-hearted and comic, serious and controversial—for anyone to dip into, contemplate, and enjoy.
The volume includes a plethora of topics from the environment, terrorism, education, sports, politics, and music to profiles of memorable figures and riveting stories of survival. These important essays reflect the high-quality work found in today's major newspapers, magazines, broadcast media, and websites. The book's contributors include such outstanding writers as Ken Armstrong of the Seattle Times; Jill Abramson, Jim Dwyer, and Walt Bogdanich of the New York Times; Evan Thomas of Newsweek; Joel Achenbach and Marc Fisher of the Washington Post; Nancy Gibbs of Time; and Jane Mayer, John McPhee, John Seabrook, and Alex Ross of the New Yorker.
The perfect collection for anyone who enjoys compelling narratives, The Princeton Reader contains a depth and breadth of nonfiction that will inspire, provoke, and endure.
What People Are Saying
Charlotte Grimes
This is an extremely valuable collection of some of the best writing in the field of journalism. Distinctive and appealing, this is one-stop shopping for delicious writing across different media forms.— Charlotte Grimes, Syracuse University
Jonathan Schell
I read this book with great pleasure. Its kaleidoscopic variety is a virtue and leads us to enjoyable surprises.— Jonathan Schell, author of "The Seventh Decade"
Product Details
Meet the Author
John McPhee's many books include "Annals of the Former World", for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Carol Rigolot is executive director of the Humanities Council at Princeton University.
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.
Table of Contents
Preface by John McPhee xiii
Aliens by Joel Achenbach 1
Baby Jessica by Evan Thomas 7
History: How American Myths Are Made 10
If You Want to Humble an Empire by Nancy Gibbs 13
Fighting for Life 50 Floors Up, with One Tool and Ingenuity by Jim Dwyer 18
US Airways Flight 1549: Old Hands on the River Didn't Have to Be Told What to Do 19
Anthrax by Marilyn Thompson 22
The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste by Walt Bogdanich 25
When the Terror Began by Alexander Wolff 29
Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America by Michael Dobbs 35
A Knock on the Door by Serge Schmemann 41
Tiananmen Massacre by Rose Tang 44
Finding Respite from Worries by Jill Abramson 50
My Father's Closet by John Seabrook 52
A Backward Glance by Elizabeth Kendall 58
Silk Parachute by John McPhee 61
The Road Block by Peter Godwin 63
Burning My Father 66
A Moving Experience by Paula Span 68
The Lure of the Frozen Lake by Julia Keller 73
True Love Is Made of This by Michael Vitez 78
The Greatest Penn Success Story 80
A Pit Bull Who Provided Lessons in Loyalty and Unfailing Love 84
A Sign: It's Jesus, or a Lunch Bargain by Peter Applebome 85
The Two Lives of John Favors'72: A Political Activist Becomes a Monk in the Hare Krishna Movement by Melvin R. McCray 88
In Albania, a Girl Who Became a Man by Barbara Demick 94
The North Korean Film Festival: No Stars, No Swag,
but What a Crowd! 97
Title Inflation: How Hollywood Watches Our Wallets by Bob Mondello 101
Ice Accommodations by Juliet Eilperin 104
The Renaissance of the Marais by Mitchel Levitas 110
Walking to Vermont by Christopher S. Wren 114
Between a Woman and Her Doctor: A Story about Abortion by Martha Mendoza 120
Baby's First Helmet by James V. Grimaldi 124
After Etan: The Missing Child Case That Held America Captive by Lisa Cohen 129
A Hostage Crisis Hits Latin America by Juanita Darling 135
Children Caught in the Immigration Crossfire by Kathy Kiely 141
A Father's Promise by Geraldine Moriba Meadows 145
McKinley High School by Athelia Knight 151
A Believing Principal Leads a Battle to Save a School by Dan Grech 157
Edison's Big Loss 161
Yodobashi No. 6 by T. R. Reid 163
Sports: The Glue for Lost Kids by Filip Bondy 169
Curtis Williams—Victory and Ruins by Ken Armstrong 172
Arson Science—To Their Rescue? by Emilie Lounsberry 180
Stinging Tentacles Offer Hint of Oceans' Decline by Elisabeth Rosenthal 185
Chernobyl: The Danger Persists by Felicity Barringer 188
Alaska: Oil's Ground Zero by Jeffrey Bartholet 194
Arctic Rush by Craig Duff 199
The X Files by Thomas E. Weber 206
Internet Gambling by Gilbert Gaul 211
Seeking New Ways to Nurture the Capacity to Report by Charles Lewis 217
Role Model: Sarah McClendon by Roberta Oster Sachs 222
Remembering a Friend: Ed Bradley Was a Gift to Journalism 223
Whose Media Are We? by Ralph J. Begleiter 226
The West and the Arab World: The Case of Media by Daoud Kuttab 233
Don't E-mail Me by Joel Stein 236
Millions of Women Weep 237
The Lessons of Cain 238
A View to a Kill by Charles Lane 241
Cuba: The End of the End of the Revolution by Roger Cohen 247
Guantánamo by Jane Mayer 253
The Promise by Ethan Bronner 259
Gaza Notebook: The Bullets in My In-Box 262
A Gaza Diary by Chris Hedges 266
In Horses, a Personal Refuge by Paul Salopek 273
Hints of Lives Are All That Remains 274
Now They Execute Polite Shuffles: There's a Strange Sameness in the Stories of Baath Party Members in Iraq 275
In Land of Ruin, a House of Stone Shelters Delight 276
Iraq: Transformation Bypasses the Heartland by Thanassis Cambanis 278
Hezbollah Fighter Strove to be a Martyr 281
Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maass 284
Bosnia's Elite "Disappeared" by Roy Gutman 289
Stone Age Ways Surviving, Barely by Calvin Sims 295
Oshima Journal: After 90 Years, Small Gestures of Joy for Lepers 297
Ella in Wonderland by Margo Jefferson 300
On Writers and Writing: D. H. Lawrence Frees the Slaves 302
Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg 305
The Prince by Claudia Roth Pierpont 311
Diary of a Bad Year, by J. M. Coetzee by Richard Eder 316
Beowulf and Fate Meet in a Modern Poet's Lens 317
John Leonard by Robert Christgau 321
Growing by Degrees: Kanye West 323
Pop Music: The Durability of Doo-Wop by Martin Gottlieb 326
On the White Side of Crossover Dreams 330
Something in the Air by Marc Fisher 333
The Sonata Seminar by Alex Ross 339
Shooting War by Mark Feeney 342
A Battalion of One's Own by Barton Gellman 345
Injured in Iraq, a Soldier Is Shattered at Home by Deborah Sontag 351
Connections by David Maraniss 357
Trevor Manuel and the Liberation of Nelson Mandela by Pippa Green 363
Jerry Brown Still Wants Your Vote by Michael Duffy 368
"I Don't Feel No Ways Tired" by Jeff Gerth 372
Fannie Lou Hamer by Kay Mills 378
Fourth of July by Greil Marcus 381
Acknowledgments 385
Index of Authors 391