Giving Good Weight
by John McPhee
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"You people come into the market--the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun--and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your stringbeans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something wonderful, you are--people of the city--and we, who are almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales." So opens the title show more piece in this collection of John McPhee's classic essays, grouped here with four others, including "Brigade de Cuisine," a profile of an artistic and extraordinary chef; "The Keel of Lake Dickey," in which a journey down the whitewater of a wild river ends in the shadow of a huge projected dam; a report on plans for the construction of nuclear power plants that would float in the ocean; and a pinball shoot-out between two prizewinning journalists. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
John McPhee has the ability to infect the reader with his enthusiasm for whatever subject he writes about. For moments at a time you will want to work at a farmers' market, shoot the rapids in northern Maine, but especially hang out with Otto eating mussels, scallops, and sweetmeats, even if you'd much rather the veal chop. So generating electricity for New Jersey on a seaborne nuclear power station or watching pinball players isn't quite up there with the perfect leek, McPhee still makes it worth reading about. And easy too.
I have been a fan of John McPhee's writing for over thirty years, but I don't know how to rate this book. The article "The Atlantic Generating Station," about a proposal to build a floating nucler power plant off the New Jersey coast in the 1970s, is flawed by a significant omission: while the article goes into significant detail about the studies of fish and wildlife and ocean currents and myriad other factors subcontracted by the nuclear industry, there are only two slight references to the subject of radioactivity, and absolutely no mention, repeat, no mention, of even the subject of issues surrounding the handling and disposal of nuclear waste. These issues were certainly widely debated before McPhee wrote his article, and given show more McPhee's stature as a journalist, I can only assume that the omission was deliberate and that this article was written as a puff piece for the nuclear industry. I don't require John McPhee to agree with me about the dangers posed by nuclear power and nuclear waste, and I would have welcomed a thoughtful, intelligent discussion of the issues, the kind of extended exploration of all facets of a subject that usually delights me about McPhee's treatment of a theme. McPhee is no stranger to nuclear subjects (his book on Ted Taylor, "The Curve of Binding Energy," showed him technically aware but politically naive), so I can only assume the omission of any mention of nuclear waste was not accidental. I feel betrayed by a trusted friend. show less
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61 works; 22 members
Author Information
59+ Works 21,095 Members
McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and 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. That same year he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with FSG, and soon followed with show more The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The Pine Barrens (1968), A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles (collection, 1969), The Crofter and the Laird (1969), Levels of the Game (1970), Encounters with the Archdruid (1972), The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (1973), The Curve of Binding Energy (1974), Pieces of the Frame (collection, 1975), and The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975). Both Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science Since 1977, the year in which McPhee received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and The John McPhee Reader and the bestselling Coming into the Country appeared in print, Farrar, Straus and Giroux has published Giving Good Weight (collection, 1979), Basin and Range (1981), In Suspect Terrain (1983), La Place de la Concorde Suisse (1984), Table of Contents (collection, 1985), Rising from the Plains (1986), Heirs of General Practice (in a paperback edition, 1986), The Control of Nature (1989), Looking for a Ship (1990), Assembling California (1993), The Ransom of Russian Art (1994), The Second John McPhee Reader (1996), and Irons in the Fire (1997). Annals of the Former World was published in 1998 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. McPhee has taught at Princeton as Ferris Professor since 1975. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Dedication
- For Laura
- First words
- You people come into the market - the Greenmarket, in the open air under the downpouring sun - and slit the tomatoes with your fingernails.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)"His hands follow what he is."
- Blurbers
- McMurtry, Larry; Siegel, Barry; Harris, Robert R.
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 081 — Computer science, information & general works Anthologies and Quotations General collections in American English
- LCC
- AC8 .M2658 — General Works Collections. Series. Collected works Collections. Series. Collected works Collections of monographs, essays, etc. American and English
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 458
- Popularity
- 66,360
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.02)
- Languages
- English, Russian
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 9
