The Patch
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Narrated by:
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John McPhee
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By:
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John McPhee
About this listen
An "album quilt", an artful assortment of nonfiction writings by John McPhee that have not previously appeared in any book.
The Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master. It is divided into two parts.
Part 1, "The Sporting Scene", consists of pieces on fishing, football, golf, and lacrosse - from fly casting for chain pickerel in fall in New Hampshire to walking the links land of St. Andrews at an Open Championship.
Part 2, called "An Album Quilt", is a montage of fragments of varying length from pieces done across the years that have never appeared in book form - occasional pieces, memorial pieces, reflections, reminiscences, and short items in various magazines including The New Yorker. They range from a visit to the Hershey chocolate factory to encounters with Oscar Hammerstein, Joan Baez, and Mount Denali.
Emphatically, the author's purpose was not merely to preserve things but to choose passages that might entertain contemporary listeners. Starting with 250,000 words, he gradually threw out 75 percent of them and randomly assembled the remaining fragments as "An Album Quilt". Among other things, it is a covert memoir.
©2018 John McPhee (P)2018 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Surprisingly, one of sport’s most contentious, complex, and defining clashes played out not in the boxing ring or at the line of scrimmage but on the genteel green fairways of the world’s finest golf courses. Arnie and Jack. Palmer and Nicklaus. Their 50-year duel, in both the clubhouse and the boardroom, propelled each to the status of American icon and pushed modern golf to the heights and popularity it enjoys today. Yet for all the ink that has been spilled on these two essential golf figures individually, no one has ever examined their relationship in this way.
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Story
In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians. They faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The children were Japanese-American, were malnourished and barefoot, and had no pool; they trained in the filthy irrigation ditches that snaked down from the mountains into the sugarcane fields.
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Great story but the Hawaiian words get slaughtered
- By Arabella on 01-26-16
By: Julie Checkoway
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Hemingway's Boat
- Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934 - 1961
- By: Paul Hendrickson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 22 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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An award-winning historian and author, Paul Hendrickson here turns his attention to one of America’s most cherished literary icons, Ernest Hemingway. Drawing on previously unpublished material, Hendrickson focuses on Hemingway’s life in its twilight, just prior to his suicide, and the seemingly singular constant in the man’s life: his boat, Pilar. On this vessel, Hemingway would entertain and travel, but it would also be the scene of some of his greatest tragedies.
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A Hemingway biography for the 21st Century
- By George on 09-16-14
By: Paul Hendrickson
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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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Freddy and Fredericka
- By: Mark Helprin
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 25 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling, critically acclaimed author Mark Helprin's work has drawn favorable comparisons to an elite group of literary legends, including James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Mann. Helprin's sheer comic brilliance shines in this ingenious farce.
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Can't rate it high enough (and I'm a tough grader)
- By Annette on 09-06-05
By: Mark Helprin
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Should the Tent Be Burning Like That?
- A Professional Amateur's Guide to the Outdoors
- By: Bill Heavey
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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For more than 20 years, Heavey has staked a claim as one of America's best sportsmen writers. In feature stories and his Field & Stream column A Sportsman's Life, he has taken audiences across the country and beyond to experience his triumphs and failures as a suburban dad who happens to love hunting and fishing. This new collection gathers together a wide range of his best work - tales that are odes to the notion that enthusiasm is more important than skill and testaments to the enduring power of the natural world.
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one of the best storytellers of all time!
- By Adam on 12-16-17
By: Bill Heavey
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The Longest Road
- Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean
- By: Philip Caputo
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Philip Caputo, who had just turned 70, his wife, and their two English setters took off in a truck hauling an Airstream camper from Key West, Florida, en route via back roads and state routes to Deadhorse, Alaska. The journey took four months and covered 17,000 miles, during which Caputo interviewed more than 80 Americans from all walks of life to get a picture of what their lives and the life of the nation are really about in the 21st century.
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Very Disappointing
- By Amazon Customer on 03-25-18
By: Philip Caputo
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Strange Stones
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: George Backman
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a far-ranging, thought-provoking collection of Peter Hessler’s best reportage - a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm sense of humor that are the trademarks of his work. Over the last decade, as a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three books, Peter Hessler has lived in Asia and the United States, writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider in these two very different regions.
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funny, entertaining
- By Katherine on 08-02-13
By: Peter Hessler
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The Great Nowitzki
- Basketball and the Meaning of Life
- By: Thomas Pletzinger, Shane Anderson - translator
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The seven-foot Dirk Nowitzki is one of the great players in basketball history. With a devastating fadeaway and unexpected agility, the Dallas Mavericks superstar helped to pioneer the modern three-shooting game and became a global ambassador for the sport. Award-winning novelist and sportswriter Thomas Pletzinger traveled with Nowitzki for more than seven years, seeking the secret of his success and longevity. In novelistic detail, Pletzinger tells the dramatic story of how a lanky kid from the German suburbs became a top-five all-time scorer and NBA champion.
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👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
- By Anonymous User on 08-22-24
By: Thomas Pletzinger, and others
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Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer
- A Journey Into the Heart of Fan Mania
- By: Warren St. John
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Warren St. John decided to find out why people care so much about the outcomes of games they're not playing in by joining a group where the particulars of the fan psyche would show themselves in sharp relief: the caravan of hundreds of RVs that follow the Alabama Crimson Tide across the South, taking over college towns with a moveable feast of Weber grills, karaoke machines, Igloo coolers, and fast-draining liquor bottles.
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Well done
- By James Younger on 10-07-04
By: Warren St. John
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Andy Rooney
- 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit
- By: Andy Rooney
- Narrated by: J. Paul Guimont
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Chairs. Neat people. Ugliness. War. Over six decades of intrepid reporting and elegant essays, Andy Rooney has proven a shrewd cultural analyst. Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit brings together the best of more than a half-century of work (including long-out-of-print pieces from his early years) in an unforgettable celebration of one of America’s funniest men. Like Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne (Mister Dooley) and Will Rogers, Andy Rooney is a classic chronicler of America, a writer for the ages.
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A good style
- By Denise L. Holtz on 11-04-16
By: Andy Rooney
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It's a landscape with the aspect of memory."
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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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Welcome to Alaska
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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.
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Fabulously entertaining and filled with the intriguing trivia of life, Irons in the Fire is another impeccably crafted collection of seven essays by John McPhee. His peerless writing, punctuated with a sharp sense of humor and fascinating detail, has earned him legions of fans across the country.
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New New Journalism is on Fire
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Levels of the Game
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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
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Silk Parachute
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It's a landscape with the aspect of memory."
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Welcome to Alaska
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McPhee's early work is brilliant.
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By: John McPhee
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Draft No. 4
- On the Writing Process
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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
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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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Not what I expected
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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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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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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
What listeners say about The Patch
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 11-15-18
A thousand details add up to one impression
A thousand details add up to one impression.
-- Cary Grant, quoted in John McPhee's 'The Patch'
...an interloper [at Princeton], a fake professor, a portfolio without minister.
-- Robert Fagles & Robert Hollander, both describing John McPhee
In my Goodreads "About Me" I'm pretty blunt:
I won't review your self-published book. I promise. Even if your book is published by a traditional publishing house (Penguin, etc), I'm not going to read and review it UNLESS I've read you before (most likely). If your name is Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, John le Carré, Robert Caro, John McPhee, etc., sure... PLEASE send me ALL your books. I'm totally game. Otherwise, you are just wasting both of our time.
That usually scares away most self-published prose pimps, but the other day I landed a REAL fish. Someone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux sent me a quick note complimenting me (I'm a whore for compliments) AND asking if I wanted a soon-to-be-published book by John McPhee to read, enjoy, and yes ... perhaps ... review?
My kids would tell you that in a choice between meeting John McPhee and God, I'd be hard pressed to choose, because to me John McPhee IS GOD. So, of course I took the book. I got it a couple days ago and just finished it today.
Lovely. The book is essentially a memoir, told through prose patches and resurrected scratches. Pieces that have been overlooked or published and never reprinted were culled, edited, and sewn together (at 87, there is a lot of past prose to examine). Part I of the book contains six sporting essays that range from fishing for pickerel in New Hampshire (The Patch), to chasing errant golf balls (The Orange Trooper), to golf at St. Andrews (Linksland and Bottle), to coach Bill Tierney (Princeton's and later Denver's) championship lacrosse coach (Pioneer). Part II is essentially a variety of small pieces (some just a paragraph, others several pages) that seem random. They span McPhee's interests from people, to places, to science, and errata. It is only as these patches come together that you begin to realize McPhee is essentially taking you on a trip through his memory as a writer, a father, and a person. McPhee's talent as a writer bubbles up, but so too does McPhee's essential humanity. His narrative nonfiction informs most good and almost all the great nonfiction writers currently making a living with words. He, along with Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, helped popularize New Journalism. His books are curiosity distilled with patience through literary prose along with a unique ability to observe the the key person in the perfect place at the right time. In this book McPhee is showing you a quilt that slowly grows into McPhee. It is a love note to his family (the book is dedicated to his 10 grandchildren) and most certainly to his readers and fans.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Mark T.
- 09-06-22
Confusing
It is confusing because there is no break between stories. There is nothing to indicate where one ends and another begins.
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- Inez
- 06-17-23
THE VARIETY OF LIFE
I LOVE JOHN MCPHEE'S WRITINGS ABOUT VARIOUS SUBJECTS HE ENCOUNTERED OR WAS DIRECTED TO WRITE ABOUT.
EACH IS LIKE A RECIPE WITH THE MAIN INGREDIENTS AND A PINCH OF HUMOR. I EVEN LISTENED TO THE STORIES
ABOUT GOLF AND LECROSSE WITH THE EYES OF A CHILD AND FOUND THEM INTERESTING. THE PATCH HAS SUCH
A VARIETY OF SUBJECTS I FINISHED THE BOOK AND IMMEDIATELY STARTED IT OVER AGAIN AND LISTENED THROUGH
IT TWICE. LOVED IT BOTH TIMES. NOW TO FIND MORE.
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- Michelle
- 02-21-19
Good but Dated
The writing, as usual was excellent but much of the material is dated. The book could have been expanded with updates on several stories.
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- Andrew Weymouth
- 04-28-19
The Orange Trapper
The amount of goodwill that McPhee has garnered with me through thousands of pages of beautiful writing means that I will happily read his detailed account of a telescoping golf ball retriever. Glad to see McPhee getting weird in his golden years.
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2 people found this helpful
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- M. Kaplan
- 03-08-19
One of a kind
John McPhee narrating his own writing is a special treat given the match between the precision of his writing and the slightly casual but still precise reading voice. His telling of stories about athletes, especially golfers and lacrosse players, is pure fun.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Jamie Todd Rubin
- 11-14-18
A hodge-podge of never-before-collected pieces
The Patch is a deliberate hodge-podge of pieces never before collected in book form. The book is divided into two parts, the first centered around sports, and the second a patchwork of writing over the decades. What I loved about the book is the diversity of pieces contained within. From fishing for pickerel, to the best techniques for finding golf balls on or near golf courses; from bears roaming New Jersey to a profile of Cary Grant. There is a little of everything here.
#Clever #Witty
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