Uncommon Carriers
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Uncommon Carriers
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Author : John McPhee
language : en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2006-05-16
Uncommon Carriers written by John McPhee and has been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2006-05-16 with Transportation categories.
What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, at his adventurous best, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation. Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot,eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the "tight-assed" Illinois River on a "towboat" pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being "a good deal longer than the Titanic." And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff in 1839. Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.
Uncommon Warriors
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Author : Ken W. Sayers
language : en
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
Release Date : 2012
Uncommon Warriors written by Ken W. Sayers and has been published by US Naval Institute Press this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012 with Warships categories.
200 Years of the Most Unusual American Naval Vessels.
The Founding Fish
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Author : John McPhee
language : en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2003-09-10
The Founding Fish written by John McPhee and has been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2003-09-10 with Nature categories.
John McPhee's twenty-sixth book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. Each spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima-leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run heroic distances upriver to spawn. McPhee--a shad fisherman himself--recounts the shad's cameo role in the lives of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. He fishes with and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists; he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and he cooks shad in a variety of ways, delectably explained at the end of the book. Mostly, though, he goes fishing for shad in various North American rivers, and he "fishes the same way he writes books, avidly and intensely. He wants to know everything about the fish he's after--its history, its habits, its place in the cosmos" (Bill Pride, The Denver Post). His adventures in pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing--expert and ardent--at which he has no equal.
Irons In The Fire
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Author : John McPhee
language : en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2011-04-01
Irons In The Fire written by John McPhee and has been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-04-01 with Literary Collections categories.
In this collection John McPhee once agains proves himself as a master observer of all arenas of life as well a powerful and important writer.
The Control Of Nature
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Author : John McPhee
language : en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2011-04-01
The Control Of Nature written by John McPhee and has been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-04-01 with Nature categories.
While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Looking For A Ship
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Author : John McPhee
language : en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2011-04-01
Looking For A Ship written by John McPhee and has been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-04-01 with Transportation categories.
This is an extraordinary tale of life on the high seas aboard one of the last American merchant ships, the S.S. Stella Lykes, on a forty-two-day journey from Charleston down the Pacific coast of South America. As the crew of the Stella Lykes makes their ocean voyage, they tell stories of other runs and other ships, tales of disaster, stupidity, greed, generosity, and courage.
Annals Of The Former World
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Author : John McPhee
language : en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2000-06-15
Annals Of The Former World written by John McPhee and has been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2000-06-15 with Science categories.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years 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. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World. Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction. Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
La Place De La Concorde Suisse
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Author : John McPhee
language : en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2011-04-01
La Place De La Concorde Suisse written by John McPhee and has been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-04-01 with Social Science categories.
La Place de la Concorde Suisse is John McPhee's rich, journalistic study of the Swiss Army's role in Swiss society. The Swiss Army is so quietly efficient at the art of war that the Israelis carefully patterned their own military on the Swiss model.
Giving Good Weight
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Author : John McPhee
language : en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2011-04-01
Giving Good Weight written by John McPhee and has been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-04-01 with Literary Collections categories.
"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 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.
Levels Of The Game
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Author : John McPhee
language : en
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date : 2011-04-01
Levels Of The Game written by John McPhee and has been published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2011-04-01 with Sports & Recreation categories.
This account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968 begins with the ball rising into the air for the initial serve and ends with the final point. McPhee provides a brilliant, stroke-by-stroke description while examining the backgrounds and attitudes which have molded the players' games.