Irons in the Fire
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Narrated by:
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Nelson Runger
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By:
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John McPhee
About this listen
These delightful pieces, including "Irons in the Fire", "Travels of the Rock", "Release", "In Virgin Forest", "The Gravel Page", "Duty of Care", and "Rinard at Manheim", reveal the fascinating worlds hiding right under our noses. Narrator Nelson Runger's studied voice conveys McPhee's understated and thought-provoking writing. If you have never sampled McPhee's inspired prose, this audiobook will turn you into a lifelong fan.
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"John McPhee has always done one thing particularly well: he writes with clarity and insight about what people do for a living." (The New York Times Book Review)
"Unhurried and good-humored, Runger eases listeners into each nuance of feeling....Whether charming or grim, McPhee's elegant phrases and marvelously choice words are aptly captured." (AudioFile)
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Tom Zoellner loves trains with a ferocious passion. In his new audiobook he chronicles the innovation and sociological impact of the railway technology that changed the world, and could very well change it again. From the frigid Trans-Siberian Railroad to the antiquated Indian Railways to the futuristic maglev trains, Zoellner offers a stirring story of man's relationship with trains. Zoellner examines both the mechanics of the rails and their engines and how they helped societies evolve. Not only do trains transport people and goods in an efficient manner, but they also reduce pollution and dependency upon oil.
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The world history of trains up to the present
- By matthew on 03-06-14
By: Tom Zoellner
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The Oregon Trail
- A New American Journey
- By: Rinker Buck
- Narrated by: Rinker Buck
- Length: 16 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In the best-selling tradition of Bill Bryson and Tony Horwitz, Rinker Buck's The Oregon Trail is a major work of participatory history: an epic account of traveling the entire 2,000-mile length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way, in a covered wagon with a team of mules - which hasn't been done in a century - that also tells the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.
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An author does not a good narrator make
- By C. Davis on 07-03-15
By: Rinker Buck
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The Good Rain
- Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest
- By: Timothy Egan
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A fantastic book! Timothy Egan describes his journeys in the Pacific Northwest through visits to salmon fisheries, redwood forests and the manicured English gardens of Vancouver. Here is a blend of history, anthropology and politics.
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White man bad, capitalism bad
- By Forget about it on 04-15-21
By: Timothy Egan
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The Patch
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: John McPhee
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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The Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master John McPhee. It is divided into two parts. It is an "album quilt", an artful assortment of nonfiction writings that have not previously appeared in any book.
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A thousand details add up to one impression
- By Darwin8u on 11-15-18
By: John McPhee
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Travels in Siberia
- By: Ian Frazier
- Narrated by: Ian Frazier
- Length: 20 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Ian Frazier trains his eye for unforgettable detail on Siberia, that vast expanse of Asiatic Russia. He explores many aspects of this storied, often grim region. He writes about the geography, the resources, the native peoples, the history, the 40-below midwinter afternoons, the bugs. The book brims with Mongols, half-crazed Orthodox archpriests, fur seekers, ambassadors of the czar bound for Peking, tea caravans, German scientists, American prospectors, intrepid English nurses, and prisoners and exiles of every kind....
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I Loved This Book
- By Sara on 01-05-14
By: Ian Frazier
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Full Body Burden
- Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
- By: Kristen Iversen
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter, Kristen Iversen
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.
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A story that no one else wanted to tell.
- By Carol on 01-28-13
By: Kristen Iversen
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That Old Ace in the Hole
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind - his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms.
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Doesn't work as a novel
- By Sarah C on 05-30-12
By: Annie Proulx
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Northland
- A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border
- By: Porter Fox
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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America's northern border is the world's longest international boundary, yet it remains obscure even to Americans. Travel writer Porter Fox spent two years exploring its length by canoe, freighter, and car - and in Northland, he delivers the little-known history of the region and a riveting account of his travels. Fox follows explorer Samuel de Champlain's adventures; recounts the rise and fall of the iron, wheat, and timber industries; crosses the Great Lakes on a freighter; and tracks America's fur traders through the Boundary Waters.
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Great listen - great narrator
- By Jonathan on 01-10-19
By: Porter Fox
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Close Range
- Wyoming Stories (Selected Unabridged Stories)
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Frances Fisher, Bruce Greenwood, Campbell Scott
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below", a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer", an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home.
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A Wonderfully Ironic and Surprising Read
- By Susan L. Stewart on 04-21-12
By: Annie Proulx
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At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults.
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Subduction leads to orogeny zones in California
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For a person who has not encountered John McPhee's lively writing, The Second John McPhee Reader is the perfect introduction. McPhee, author of Coming Into the Country, and Assembling California punctuates his delightful prose with a sharp sense of humor and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice.
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Not what I expected
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It's a landscape with the aspect of memory."
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Coming into the Country
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Coming into the Country is an unforgettable account of Alaska and Alaskans. It is a rich tapestry of vivid characters, observed landscapes, and descriptive narrative, in three principal segments that deal, respectively, with a total wilderness, with urban Alaska, and with life in the remoteness of the bush.
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Subduction leads to orogeny zones in California
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For a person who has not encountered John McPhee's lively writing, The Second John McPhee Reader is the perfect introduction. McPhee, author of Coming Into the Country, and Assembling California punctuates his delightful prose with a sharp sense of humor and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice.
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Not what I expected
- By Privacy Maven on 11-08-23
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The Founding Fish
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Few fish are as beloved, or as obsessed over, as the American shad. Although shad spend most of their lives in salt water, they enter rivers by the hundreds of thousands in the spring and swim upstream heroic distances in order to spawn, then return to the ocean.
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Read and released.
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-14
By: John McPhee
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Basin and Range
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To geologists, rocks are beautiful, roadcuts are windowpanes, and the earth is alive, a work in progress. The cataclysmic movement that gives birth to mountains and oceans is ongoing and can still be seen at certain places on our planet. One of these is the Basin and Range region centered in Nevada and Utah.
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Wow.
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This account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968 begins with the ball rising into the air for the initial serve and ends with the final point. McPhee provides a brilliant, stroke-by-stroke description while examining the backgrounds and attitudes which have molded the players' games.
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McPhee's early work is brilliant.
- By Darwin8u on 06-12-23
By: John McPhee
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Draft No. 4
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Draft No. 4 is an elucidation of the writer's craft by a master practitioner. In a series of playful but expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he's gathered over his career and refined during his long-running course at Princeton University, where he has launched some of the most esteemed writers of several generations. McPhee offers a definitive guide to the crucial decisions regarding structure, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces and presents extracts from some of his best-loved work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny.
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McPhee is the Craft
- By Darwin8u on 09-19-17
By: John McPhee
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The Second John McPhee Reader, Book Two
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For a person who has not encountered John McPhee's lively writing, The Second John McPhee Reader is the perfect introduction. McPhee, author of Coming Into the Country, punctuates his delightful prose with a sharp sense of humor, and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice.
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An Eclectic Collections of Stories but...
- By Sparkie on 07-20-05
By: John McPhee
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Tabula Rasa: Volume 1
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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A New Yorker writer surveys his office boxes...
- By Darwin8u on 09-04-23
By: John McPhee
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Encounters with the Archdruid
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- Unabridged
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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.
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McPhee at the absolute height of his powers
- By Tom Craven on 06-25-24
By: John McPhee
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In Search of the Old Ones
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- Unabridged
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David Roberts describes the culture of the Anasazi - the name means "enemy ancestors" in Navajo - who once inhabited the Colorado Plateau and whose modern descendants are the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism.
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good story if you don't want to learn about Indian
- By Robert B. on 03-09-18
By: David Roberts
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Oranges
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- Unabridged
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A classic of reportage, Oranges was first conceived as a magazine article, but John McPhee kept encountering so much irresistible information that he wrote a book. It is perhaps the last word on the subject (the first came in 500 BC and is attributed to Confucius). McPhee writes about the botany, history, and industry of oranges, from the great orangeries of European monarchs to a fascinating profile of Ben Hill Griffin of Frostproof, Florida, who may be the last of the individual orange barons.
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Home
- By Melissa Whitehurst on 10-04-24
By: John McPhee
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Of Wolves and Men
- By: Barry Lopez
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- Unabridged
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Humankind's relationship with the wolf is the sum of a spectrum of responses ranging from fear to admiration and affection. Lopez's classic, careful study has won praise from a wide range of reviewers and improved the way books on wild animals are written. Of Wolves and Men explores the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf's prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures.
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To Better Know Wolves
- By REV on 08-20-22
By: Barry Lopez
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Crossing Open Ground
- By: Barry Lopez
- Narrated by: Barry Lopez
- Length: 2 hrs and 39 mins
- Abridged
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Elegantly told against a haunting melodic backdrop, Crossing Open Ground's brilliant descriptions will sweep you into a new perspective - the land both gives us strength and molds our souls.
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Poetry or prose or both.
- By yosemiteguide on 03-14-22
By: Barry Lopez
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A World on the Wing
- The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds
- By: Scott Weidensaul
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In the past two decades, our understanding of the navigational and physiological feats that enable birds to cross immense oceans, fly above the highest mountains, or remain in unbroken flight for months at a stretch has exploded. What we've learned of these key migrations is nothing short of extraordinary. This breathtaking work of nature writing also introduces listeners to those scientists, researchers, and bird lovers trying to preserve global migratory patterns in the face of climate change and other environmental challenges.
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Fantastic book for any nature enthusiast
- By FernT on 05-23-21
By: Scott Weidensaul
What listeners say about Irons in the Fire
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Richard
- 04-18-13
Great Entertainment In Classic McPhee Style.
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
This work was 75 % entertainment and 25% education, the inverse of the usual McPhee ratio, in my view anyway. I usually give his books a triple read /listen because they're so informationally packed, but not this one. Still, it was worth the time. But not three times the time.
What did you like best about this story?
Forensic geology.
Which scene was your favorite?
Rustling up cattle rustlers.
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
No- not relevant to a collection of essays.
Any additional comments?
I liked the wry sense of humor always lurking in the background in what otherwise might be considered a collection of merely interesting topics, nonetheless superbly written about. The narrator was also top-notch in conveying McPhee's subtle humorous undertone. Without that, this might have been a flop.
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- Darwin8u
- 02-10-15
New New Journalism is on Fire
A nice collection of essays that originally appeared in the New Yorker (most of McPhee's writings can be traced back to the New Yorker):
1. 'Irons in the Fire' (December 20, 1993) - About cattle rustling in Nevada.
2. 'Release' (September 28, 1987) - About Robert Russell, a blind professor at Franklin and Marshall College,in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
3. 'In Virgin Forest' (July 6, 1987) - About Hutcheson Memorial Forest in Franklin Township, New Jersey.
4. 'The Gravel Page' (January 29, 1996) - About geological forensics.
5. 'Duty of Care' (Jun 28, 1993) - About recycling tires.
6. 'Rinard at Manheim' (Dec 4, 1989) - About the Manheim Exotic Auction in Pennsylvania
7. 'Travels of the Rock' (Dec 4, 1989) - About Plymouth Rock and its re-mortaring.
There are several FANTASTIC pieces and several pieces of mortar holding it together. Not his best collection, but I have yet to regret reading a McPhee book and this is no exception. Essays to not miss: 'Irons in the Fire', 'In Virgin Forest', 'The Gravel Page', 'Duty of Care', 'Travels of the Rock'. I think my favorite of the whole book were 'Irons in the Fire' and 'The Gravel Page'. Amazing pieces.
'Irons in the Fire' explores the ranchers, the Brand Inspectors, the rustlers, and the cattle land of Nevada. These are cowboys. These are the hard-core libertarian Mormons that produced Cliven Bundy and his ilk. These are the mountains and deserts where Utah, Nevada, and Arizona all meet. This essays was poignant for me because one of the characters/rustlers/ropers/breaker of horses in the essay (Wayne Lee) was a direct descendent of John D. Lee. John D. Lee was an adopted son of Brigham Young who was later shot for his direct role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
John D. Lee was also the husband of my 5th Great-Grandmother (Abigail Schaeffer Woolsey Lee), and my 5th Great-Grandfather's (Joseph Henry Woolsey) two sisters (Rachel Woolsey and Agatha Woolsey). No direct blood, but a helluva lot of history and stories. If you want to figure out why this section of Nevada and Utah produce such fundamentally hard people, McPhee's essay is as good a place as any to start.
'The Gravel Page' was originally three linked essays in the New Yorker: 'The Gravel Page', 'Balloons of War', and 'Death of an Agent'. This is where McPhee is amazing. You put McPhee in a room or a car with the right person, start having him talk to them about Geology, Ecology, Arts & Crafts, or Sports and something magical happens with the narrative. These are the stories McPhee was born to write.
The Gravel Page presents three different facets of forensic geology. The first essay focuses on the investigation of A. Coors murder using geology. The second essays explores how early scientists from the Geological Survey were able to establish where the balloons that Japan was drifting over America came from. The final story details how forensic geologists at the FBI were able to track down where a DEA agent was killed and buried in Mexico using geology. His love of the subject and the characters AND place enables McPhee to weave a story that transports the reader around the world, while having on McPhee's every sentence.
Anyway, seek them out. Look them up. Buy them. Read them. Read them again.
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Overall
- W. Lawliss
- 06-24-10
Interesting, but definitely not Humor
While the essays are interesting, the book certainly is not "punctuated with a sharp sense of humor" as the summary states. There is no attempt at humor be it sharp, wry, witty, sarcastic or any other kind. It deliveres on trivia, but the note on humor must be a typo.
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- wbiro
- 02-28-17
Still Fresh and Relevant (after 20 years)
Not enough has changed in the last 20 years to render this book outdated.
The first story (of the Cattle Brand Inspector) was so good I wondered how he was going to follow that up with anything as interesting, and he did - I found myself listened for hours (I can listen to audiobooks at work and while commuting, a total of 13 1/2 hours a day) without realizing I was still listening, for whatever that's worth (meaning I wasn't falling asleep as with, say, a molecular biology lecture).
After listening to the piece on how corrupt Mexico is (or was 20 years ago, but I see no reason to assume that the situation is any better today, and I have a Mexican immigrant at work to talk to) in the face of their drug culture, I thought, "Trump can't build that wall fast enough, if only to send a message that they have not been good neighbors (if not that they are an utterly screwed-up country)".
The Mobile Farmer's Market in Manhattan piece was a pleasant digression (which turned into a full-blown piece).
The others were engaging, though I can't recall them off the top of my head (I'd need some kind of stimulus/reminder to bring it all back)... (cheating...) ah yes - the Forensic Geologist story (you can see why that was hard to remember) was good enough to stand alone - a lot of history went with it.
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- Twang
- 10-04-16
A Jewel
Holmes would approve. A wonderful ride through history, lives well lived, and the geology that binds them.
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- Kindle Customer
- 03-31-24
Great McPhee book
The accounts of forensic geology are fascinating. From Japanese ballon ballast sand, to the mud in the Coors assailant’s wheel wells, to tracing the location of a US DEA agent massacre in Mexico.
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