Second John McPhee Reade

McPhee is a hands-on writer. Working for a farmer, he sells produce off trucks and vans in New York City's Greenmarket program (Giving Good Weight). He hitches a ride on a U.S. merchant marine ship and survives a pirate attack in Guayaquil, Ecuador (Looking for a Ship). He goes on patrol across majestic terrain with a battalion of the ever-ready Swiss army (La Place de la Concorde Suisse). In four geology books excerpted here (Assembling California, etc.), he travels from the Appalachians to the Sierra Nevada in the company of scientists who help him chart the continental shifts that created the North American landscape. Whether he is discussing Alaska's rugged settlers, altruistic young doctors in rural Maine, Los Angeles-area residents fighting rock slides or art collector Norton Dodge, who smuggled 10,000 nonconformist artworks out of the Soviet Union, McPhee's precise, graceful prose explores his subjects' hopes, fears and motives amid life's sheer unpredictability. This delightful anthology (a sequel to one published by FSG in 1977) gathers some of McPhee's most enduring work. (Feb.)