Annals of the Former World
By John McPhee
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1998

I first encountered the writer John McPhee about ten years ago on a remote stretch of the Salmon River in the wilds of northern Alaska just inside the Arctic Circle. That’s where he was, at least. I was sitting in the sun outside a small restaurant near my office in midtown Manhattan. But such was McPhee’s evocation of the Kobuk Valley landscape that it was easy to look at the flow of traffic up Third Avenue and overlay the taxis, buses, and buildings with darting graylings, marauding grizzlies, and stands of virgin willow trees.

I was a latecomer to the tribe of McPhee readers. For some reason, despite avidly consuming the work of other in-house masters at The New Yorker such as Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, I’d managed to avoid McPhee. I’d nod sagely when his name came up in conversation, but I never actually sat down to read his stuff. I vaguely associated him with the New Journalism of the 1960s, but where I’d been drawn to gawp at the stylistic pyrotechnics of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Truman Capote, I viewed McPhee, with his forensic dissections of flora and fauna as, well, a trifle dull. Twenty thousand words on the virtues of Florida oranges or Bill Bradley’s jump shot? No thanks.

That changed right about the time I decided to leave my legal career and become a writer, or at least a journalist. My first job was editing a three-hole-punch financial monthly then put out by Steve Brill’s American Lawyer. The job came with a small office, two dutiful junior editors, and David Marcus, a hyperkinetic staff writer who, with scant prompting, would hold forth at length and with surprising...

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