Silk Parachute

January 25, 2010
The world’s complex mechanisms beguile us in this scintillating collection of essays, many from the New Yorker
. McPhee is fascinated by all manner of intricate and subtle processes. His topic might be the slow geological forces that produced the chalk formations underlying the landscape of northwestern Europe or the stolid wine-making procedures of the French vineyards atop them. It might be the lightning-fast maneuvers in the sport of lacrosse or the evangelizing social networks that are spreading it across the continent. It might be the splashy tricks he and his friends performed with their canoes at summer camp, or the finicky machinery of his daughter’s box camera, its long exposures rendering all moving objects invisible. It might be the New Yorker
’s mighty fact-checking juggernaut churning out answers to the most obscure questions, or the oddly shaped mental gears that processed editor William Shawn’s legendary food phobias, or the wondrous workings of a toy silk parachute. However arcane the subject, McPhee wraps it in nicely wrought narrative and piquant characters, as when a random outing with his granddaughter sparks a discourse on theories of mass extinction. The result is a narrative that is wryly humorous, raptly observant, luxuriating in idle curiosity.

February 1, 2010
This is not a new McPhee reader, though surely a third such volume is merited, but rather a collection of the best of his funny and affecting personal essays, works that offer glimpses of McPhee as a willful, curious boy; a nervous rookie New Yorker staff writer; and a bemused and proud father and grandfather. The stellar title essay is a glorious curveball homage to his mother. McPhee also writes of canoeing and lacrosse. Does eating eccentric food count as an athletic endeavor? It does when McPhee lives off the land with Euell Gibbons. And certainly fact-checking as practiced at the New Yorker (the home for earlier versions of these delectable pieces), and described in Checkpoints, qualifies as the literary equivalent of an Olympic sport. Season on the Chalk is a quintessential McPhee essayhe is a game-changing master of the formin which the roll and pitch of his sentences embody the topography of Europes strange and fabled chalk country. Whatever his subject, McPhees virtuoso and deeply engaging essays convey the profound pleasure of attending to the world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)