Irons in the Fire

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Whether attending an auction of exotic cars, watching masons repair a crack in Plymouth Rock or exploring a primeval virgin woods in central New Jersey, prolific essayist McPhee has a marvelous knack for finding the universal in the particular. The title essay of this latest collection of New Yorker pieces is a ripsnorting account of cattle rustling in Nevada that harks back to the Wild West. In California, McPhee ponders an environmental disaster in the making as he inspects the world's largest mountain of scrapped automobile tires. Other pieces deal with a blind professor of English who uses a talking computer and forensic geologists who sift sand, pebbles, microfossils and mineral grains to solve murders, track down terrorists and pinpoint remote geographies. McPhee's usual craftsmanship, unflappable curiosity and openness to experience shine through as he discovers worlds off the beaten path, microcosms wherein he takes human nature as his province. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Most people think cattle rustling belongs to the past or to Wild West movies, yet, as McPhee informs us, the practice still presents problems for cattle ranchers in Nevada, necessitating the state position of brand inspector. In addition to this title essay, McPhee's collection features other unusual topics, such as repairing the crack in Plymouth Rock and tracing murders through geological clues. McPhee, a prolific writer best known for his best-selling Coming into the Country (1977), employs an accessible journalistic style and a scientific sensibility that stimulate interest and understanding in his somewhat esoteric subjects. In the Plymouth Rock essay, for instance, he surrounds his description of the actual repair with a social and geological history of the famous landmark. This book will appeal to curious readers looking for something unusual, especially those interested in the West and the geological sciences. McPhee's essays are entertaining as well as enlightening. For all libraries.-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

Kirkus Reviews

Nothing, it seems, is beyond McPhee's purview, and these seven essays (which first ran in the New Yorker) offer further evidence that in the right hands even the most prosaic of topics harbors an unsuspected richness of surprising facts and fancies.

McPhee (The Ransom of Russian Art, 1994; Looking for a Ship, 1990, etc.) casts his net wide. The title essay describes his journey to Nevada to examine the process of branding cattle. Along the way, he turns up tales of high-tech cattle rustling and offers some typically shrewd glimpses of the lives of ranchers and cattle- brand inspectors. Lyrical to a deadpan fault, McPhee can describe a lowing herd as no other writer: "They sound like baritone whales. They sound like jets passing overhead without Doppler effect. They sound like an all-tuba band warming up." Elsewhere, on more familiar but no less startling ground for his readers, McPhee looks at forensic geology, relating how beer magnate Adolph Coors's killer was tracked down through careful study of the mineral grains deposited on a car's underside, and describes how an FBI geologist helped to solve the murder in Mexico—-no thanks to the corrupt Mexican police—-of Drug Enforcement Agency agent Enrique Salazar. Perhaps the most fascinating piece here concerns one of the most ubiquitous objects in contemporary society—-tires. McPhee visits the largest tire dumps in America, interviews an assortment of surprisingly visionary entrepenuers, and emerges, as usual, with an arcane yet impressive array of statistics; for example, three billion tires sit discarded in the US, from which 178 million barrels of oil could be recovered. McPhee also profiles a blind writer who relies on a humorously idiosyncratic talking computer, describes the efforts of a mason to repair the cracks in Plymouth Rock, and in one of his more uncharacteristic essays, attends a unique auction of exotic cars in Pennsylvania.

Newcomers to McPhee, welcome. For old hands, more of the unique pleasures you have come to expect.

From the Publisher

"McPhee is known as the dean of 'literary journalists' . . . His writing creates its own wonderful topographical map of the ways of the world, contemplated with both microcosmic closeness and cosmic breadth."—Kate Shatzkin, The Baltimore Sun

"Somehow McPhee finds, again and again, the kind of people we're told don't exist anymore: unsung heroes . . . living lives of absolute mastery of their varied fields. A master himself, McPhee writes about them with grace. This is a close to poetry as journalism gets."—Andrea Gollin, Miami Herald

"McPhee's essays are proof that the kind of journalism that can effortlessly put a topic into perfect perspective will never go out of style."—Robert R. Harris, The New York Times Book Review