The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world--a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds...

The story of a ranch in Wyoming, the geologist who grew up there, and the high-country geology of the surrounding land.

Ten essays cover a wide range of topics, including recollections of the author's youth and discussions of lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, weird foods he has been served, and a season in Europe.

Discusses the land and the lives of the people of Alaska, the wilderness areas and the urban centers.

"An "album quilt," an artful assortment of nonfiction writings by John McPhee that have not previously appeared in any book" --

"Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer's craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and he presents extracts from his work,...

"Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross-section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with." "Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a many-layered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it, guided...

In the 1960s and 1970s, Norton Dodge, an American professor of Soviet economics, bought thousands of works of dissident Soviet art. The author investigates Dodge's activities and motives, and the fate of the artists whose works he bought.

The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.