Yesterday I shared a list of John McPhee paperbacks that are in our home library. Using Google Gemini I had it prepare a list of the books from a photo I had taken of the stack of books.
Today as I was on my morning walk listening to an Economist podcast about de Tocqueville in America, it dawned on me that I should come back to Gemini and ask it for a ranked list of McPhee books that I should consider adding to our home library. Here is the prompt I used:
Now give me a list of his books that I don’t own. Rank the list based on recommendations. Include the same info as before.
Here is that list – useful the next time I’m at a used bookstore!
Recommended John McPhee Books (Not in Your Stack)
This curated list ranks the best books by John McPhee that are missing from your current home library. It prioritizes his most historically significant, critically acclaimed, and widely loved masterpieces.
1. Annals of the Former World
Year Published: 1998
Summary: This monumental, 700-page epic is the culmination of twenty years of research and travel alongside geological experts. It traces the deep geological history of the North American continent along the Interstate 80 corridor. The book is actually a compilation of five smaller works (Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, Assembling California, and Crossing the Craton), tracking plate tectonics, mountain building, glaciers, and deep time.
How Reviewed: Widely considered McPhee’s magnum opus, it won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Critics universally praised it for taking what is traditionally considered a “dry” science and turning it into a gripping, human, and philosophically profound narrative about the Earth’s violent history.
An Interesting Story: McPhee originally estimated the geology project would take him about one to two years. It ended up consuming two decades of his life. Because geologists make notoriously distracted drivers—constantly swerving across highway lanes to examine exposed rock formations on roadcuts—McPhee had to do most of the driving during their cross-country road trips just to keep them safe.
2. Coming into the Country
Year Published: 1977
Summary: An extraordinary three-part portrait of Alaska during a chaotic, pivotal era in the 1970s. The first part covers a dangerous, pristine wilderness canoe trip down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range. The second details the political gridlock of trying to establish a new state capital. The third and longest section is an intimate look at the rugged, eccentric, and fiercely independent settlers of the remote gold-rush town of Eagle near the Yukon border.
How Reviewed: A massive bestseller and critical triumph. It is universally regarded as one of the greatest books ever written about Alaska, capturing both the staggering scale of the wilderness and the complex, headstrong psychology of the people who flee to it.
An Interesting Story: While documenting the remote lives of wilderness settlers, McPhee met a man living in a cabin who had survived a brutal sub-zero winter with almost no food. At one point, the man’s entire remaining winter rations consisted of a single, frozen head of cabbage. McPhee’s meticulous fact-checkers at The New Yorker tracked down the source to verify the exact status and size of the cabbage before they would let him publish the story.
3. The Pine Barrens
Year Published: 1968
Summary: An exploration of a sprawling, million-acre wilderness of pitch pines, cedar swamps, and sandy aquifers hidden in the middle of heavily urbanized New Jersey. McPhee describes the unique ecology of the area and profiles the isolated, self-reliant residents—traditionally called “Pineys”—who lived off the land by gathering cranberries, digging bog iron, and hunting.
How Reviewed: A classic of regional literature and early environmental journalism. It was praised for exposing a secret, beautiful world right in the backyard of the busy East Coast, and it is widely credited with helping to spark the political movement that ultimately federally protected the region.
An Interesting Story: At the time McPhee wrote the book, there were major state plans to pave over the Pine Barrens to build a massive, multi-runway international jetport and a brand new city of 250,000 people. McPhee’s beautifully written, highly sympathetic portrait of the area’s quiet wilderness and historic communities turned public opinion so heavily against the developers that the entire project was permanently scrapped.
4. Levels of the Game
Year Published: 1969
Summary: A masterclass in narrative structure. The book is framed entirely around a single semi-final tennis match played at the 1968 US Open at Forest Hills between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. As the play-by-play of the match unfolds stroke-by-stroke, McPhee weaves in the biographies of the two young men, demonstrating how their family backgrounds, races, and political worldviews directly dictate the way they play tennis.
How Reviewed: Frequently cited by sportswriters as one of the greatest sports books ever written. Critics were mesmerized by how McPhee transformed a simple, brief tennis match into a brilliant, microscopic psychological study of two contrasting Americas in the late 1960s.
An Interesting Story: The book’s structure is incredibly tight—there are no chapters or headers; it reads as one continuous, unbroken volley of text from the first serve to the final match point. Because the manuscript was so structurally dependent on the exact sequence of tennis play, McPhee had to build a massive physical storyboard using index cards on his dining room table to track the score of the match alongside his biographical flashbacks.
5. Encounters with the Archdruid
Year Published: 1971
Summary: A brilliant structural experiment in narrative journalism. The book profiles David Brower, the passionately uncompromising executive director of the Sierra Club (whom his adversaries mockingly called “the Archdruid”). McPhee takes Brower on three separate wilderness expeditions, pairing him on each trip with one of his primary ideological enemies: a mineral engineer in the North Cascades, a resort developer on a pristine Georgia barrier island, and a dam-building commissioner in the depths of the Grand Canyon.
How Reviewed: Highly praised for its absolute neutrality. Instead of taking a side, McPhee steps back and allows both sides of the environmental debate to articulate their values in real-time as they hike, raft, and camp together.
An Interesting Story: During the Grand Canyon rafting trip, David Brower and his fierce ideological opponent, Floyd Dominy (the commissioner responsible for constructing major western dams), were forced to share a tiny rubber raft through dangerous, churning whitewater rapids. Dominy, a tough-talking Westerner, was terrified of the water. Brower, despite hating Dominy’s dams, quietly guided the raft safely through the rapids, forging a brief, surreal moment of mutual respect between the two bitter enemies.
6. Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
Year Published: 2017
Summary: A masterclass handbook on the art and craft of nonfiction writing. Pulling from his decades of writing for The New Yorker and his legendary writing seminars at Princeton University, McPhee reveals his highly structured, sometimes eccentric methodology for conducting interviews, organizing mountains of research, drawing structural diagrams, and editing drafts.
How Reviewed: Celebrated as an instant classic for writers, students, and journalists. Reviewers loved the book’s warm, humble, and practical advice, combined with hilarious behind-the-scenes anecdotes of the editing world.
An Interesting Story: McPhee reveals that during his early career, he suffered from such severe writer’s block that he would literally tie himself to his office chair with a bathrobe sash to force himself to stay at his desk and type. He also details his “search-and-replace” editing method: on his fourth draft, he reads his work with a dictionary, finding any word that feels slightly lazy or uninspired, circling it, and listing dozens of synonyms beneath it until he finds the perfect match.
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