The NY Times acrostic today [spoiler alert] is a passage from John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country, a book that was serialized in The New Yorker in 1977. That’s where I came across it. My parents subscribed, and though I was at that time living on my own in Greenwich Village, I probably went “home” for a weekend and read it there.
Like anything from McPhee’s pen, the writing is superb.
Coming Into the Country made me want to learn more about the world around me – not just electrons and equations, but, as Shakespeare has it, such stuff as dreams are made on. McPhee is as inquisitive as a detective, and he writes with an unmatched combination of simplicity and elegance.
But most of all, he tells the story of what we see and don’t notice. Of bears and Alaskans. Of synclines and geologists. Of writing itself. (Coming Into the Country, Annals of the Former World, and Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, respectively.)