Silk Parachute

by John McPhee

A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE'S PROSE PIECES—IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES

The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here—highly varied in length and theme—McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a season in Europe "on the chalk" from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and the champagne country of northern France. Some of the pieces are wholly personal. In luminous recollections of his early years, for example, he goes on outings with his mother, deliberately overturns canoes in a learning process at a summer camp, and germinates a future book while riding on a jump seat to away games as a basketball player. But each piece—on whatever theme—contains somewhere a personal aspect in which McPhee suggests why he was attracted to write about the subject, and each opens like a silk parachute, lofted skyward and suddenly blossoming with color and form.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Audiobook, Sports, American, Science

240 pages, Hardcover

First published March 2, 2010

About the author

John Angus McPhee is an American writer. He is considered one of the pioneers of creative nonfiction. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category General Nonfiction, and he won that award on the fourth occasion in 1999 for Annals of the Former World (a collection of five books, including two of his previous Pulitzer finalists). In 2008, he received the George Polk Career Award for his "indelible mark on American journalism during his nearly half-century career". Since 1974, McPhee has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

Reviews

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It's a landscape with the aspect of memory."
Laura McPhee or Virginia Beahan talking about the landscape around Trenton, NJ (I'm not sure who exactly is being quoted, it might be a slight narrative allusion to the title and subject of this essay, and McPhee is playing with the reader a bit) in "Under the Cloth" by John McPhee



I bought this book almost 8 years ago. I'm not sure why I didn't read it in 2010. It was shelved next to the remaining 8-9 McPhee books I haven't read and not forgotten, just posponed. Well, I jumped back into reading McPhee again (I can't sip McPhee, he is best consumed in large quantities until exhausted). I was sent a copy of his most recent book of essays: The Patch. And it got me rolling again. I want to finish, catch-up, complete McPhee before he is 90 (March 8, 2021). So I need to get to work again.

The book consists of several (six?) essays that appeared in the New Yorker (no surprise to ANYONE the least bit familiar with either the New Yorker or McPhee). It also begins and ends with short essays and also includes a couple essays not found outside this book (that I can find):

1. "Silk Parachute" - A short, beautiful introductory essay about his mother and childhood.
2. "Season on the Chalk" - 3/12/2007
3. "Swimming with Canoes" - 8/10/1998
4. "Warming the Jump Seat" - A short essay about writing about Mr. Boyden, headmaster of Deerfield Academy, profiled in two articles in the New Yorker in 1966, and eventually, put into a book published by FSG titled: The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield
5. "Spin Right and Shoot Left" - 3/23/2009
6. "Under the Cloth" - An essay about the dual photography of McPhee's daughter Laura (I just ordered a couple of her books on Amazon) and Virginia Beahan (a form/version of this essay originally appeared as an afterword in their book of photographs, titled: 'No Ordinary Land: Encounters in a Changing Environment'). I was happy to see that Ariel Katz, in her wonderful essay "Photography and Language in John McPhee's "Under the Cloth" came away with the same impression I did earlier and above in my lead quote by Laura or Virginia:

"The way McPhee structures his essay mirrors his subject matter: much of the dialogue in the essay isn’t attributed to either photographer, giving their words the effect of having emerged, at times, as a chorus from inside the camera with which they work. Although they’re making visual art, language, as McPhee observes, is key to their collaboration. He writes, 'Neither one is hesitant with words. In the span of their work together, words by the tens of thousands, in every conceivable category, have been muffled by the dark cloth.'”

7. "My Life List" - 9/3/2007
8. "Checkpoints" - 2/9/2009
9. "Rip Van Golfer" - 8/6/2007
10. "Nowheres" - A touching and brief concluding essay on the beauty of New Jersy, McPhee's home.

Anyway, you can read 6/10 of essays and probably 8/10 of the text directly from the New Yorker if you don't run out of free views (I did just checking for this essay) or you can subscribe (I will next year) or you can just buy the damn book from FSG. It really was a delight on a day of delights (Thanksgiving). I am grateful, every year, for John McPhee.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the cool stuff that they don't teach in school.

-- Rattlesnakes, for all their evolutionary perfection, are not the brightest creatures. "If a line of people walks past a rattlesnake, it aims at the first person, strikes at the second, and hits the third."

-- In the way that a placer miner can look at a nugget and say what stream it came from, a lacrosse coach can watch an unknown player for a while and write down his home address.

-- The performance enhancing food for Olympic marathoners and such is Vespa mandarinia japonica, actually synthetic hornet juice, but what our author calls bee spit. The Japanese giant hornet "flies about a hundred kilometers a day ingesting but not digesting small insects, which it carries home in globular form to feed its larvae. The juice that goes for the gold is in the larvae. While the adult feeds the larvae, the larvae reciprocate with fresh juice, a blend of seventeen amino acids." If you're not a marathoner, or such, you can sit on the sofa, drink the bee spit, and are guaranteed to lose weight.

-- The worst checking error for a magazine fact checker is calling people dead who are not dead. "It really annoys them," McPhee quotes one fact checker. He tells the story of one reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was the the late reader in a nursing home. He called, demanding a correction. The magazine complied of course, in its next issue, "inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed."

-- Glaciation has replaced an asteroid or volcano as the leading theory for the cause of the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

You would have thought that McPhee's essay about the U.S. Open played at Oakmont Country Club would be my favorite, but I preferred reading about exotic foods, lacrosse, the tunnels in the Maastrichtian chalk where Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" sat out World War II. I liked reading about the fact checkers the most. This is something you either get or you don't. Like if an author writes the phrase "Penn's daughter Margaret", the fact checker's challenge becomes whether to put commas around Margaret or not put commas around Margaret. In other words, did William Penn have one or more daughters. Margaret, one of Penn's several daughters, went into the book without commas.

With every essay, I thought "He would like this" or "She has to read this." Let me scroll down my list of GR friends and look and see if there's anyone who would be as delighted as I was.....reading an essay about commas.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The amazing thing about John McPhee is that he can hold one's attention even when the subject matter is not otherwise interesting. The longest essays in Silk Parachute are about lacrosse and golf, neither of which sports is to my taste. Yet the great mass of details he presents somehow make the reader wonder what's next. That is no mean talent.

To date, I have read a dozen of McPhee's books, and I'm not finished yet.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two delightful long essays and 8 short ones that simply tantalize. "Season on the Chalk" compresses history and geology of chalk in England and continental Europe in a fine thread with surprising people and events from the Romans, who build much with chalk, to modern champaign arbors, which depend on chalk holding water. "Spin Right and Shoot Left" is a fun ride on the history of lacrosse. Like a good chef, McPhee makes a reliably good dish out of available ingredients at hand, making a lie out of any initial perspective that you know nothing about and care little about lacrosse. Started by the Iriquois Nations in the 19th century, how was it that it was adopted first by Ivy League and prep schools, then moved to hotbeds Baltimore, Long Island, and Colorado, then grew exponentially? Between 2007 and 2009, 600 new public high schools adopted the sport. Read and learn about how it has more affinity with basketball than any other sport.�

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend mentioned this book back in March, saying she'd read a review of it that made her think she'd like it, and wondering if I'd heard of McPhee. Since he writes for the New Yorker, and I'm one of those New Yorker subscribers who reads every single article, even if it doesn't immediately seem to be about something I'm interested in, I figured I must have read his work, but still couldn't place his name. Then I looked in the New Yorker's digital archive and realized he'd written a 2007 piece called "Season on the Chalk," about the chalk landscapes of Europe, including bits about geology and wine-making and WWII history, which I'd entirely forgotten about until I saw it there. But once I heard the title I remembered liking it so much I tore the whole thing out of the magazine and kept it for a while, because it was just so good. Here's the start of that essay, which is included in this book:

The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment and have attracted the attention of Tommaso, who now starts his own with the letter "R". (p 9)

I love that so much: the pace of it, the way it sets the scene; I love this whole essay for the way it's about landscape/place, the way it mingles broad historical fact with personal experience. I love how wonderfully precise McPhee can be, with sentences like this: "An armada of swans, in single file, swims out from near the shore and toward the center of the river—thirty-eight swans" (p 10).

And while others of McPhee's essays don't excite me quite as much, I still admire the way he writes, the care and pleasure it seems he takes in it, whether he's writing about his mother or canoeing or eating unusual meats (puffin, weasel, bear) or lacrosse.(Yes, I sometimes wished that particular essay (which is 58 pages) would hurry up and be done already, but that's more a comment on my tastes than on McPhee's writing. And when I did finish the essay on lacrosse, moving on to an essay about antique view cameras/his daughter's photographic collaborations with Virginia Beahan (really pleasing landscapes, like this and this), I forgot my boredom and was delighted all over again by the McPhee's particular mix of description and detail and humor.) Also really pleasing: an essay about unusual foods, an essay about fact-checking that's in large part a paean to fact-checkers.

[Vic Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

An essay on a child's toy and early life in New Jersey. An essay about the chalk formation that forms the White Cliffs of Dover. An extended essay about Lacrosse. Then one about large format still cameras, the kind his daughter and her photographer coworker use. One that might be titled "Odd Foods I've Eaten." So goes John McPhee's essay collection "Silk Parachute."
McPhee brings his usual method of storytelling to bear on a wide variety of topics in this collection. I found them to be interesting enough but did not track any subject I felt close to. It is a collection largely for McPhee readers like myself who want to read his work because we enjoy the way McPhee engages his subjects. Always insightful and respectful. Always humane. Not always uncritical.
I would recommend this to anyone who already enjoys McPhee. If you are not familiar with his writing I would probably recommend something else of his, maybe "Basin and Range" or "The Last Birch Bark Canoe."

[andré crombie · Rating 4 out of 5]

For well casings, foundations, fortifications, and bathhouses, among other things, the Romans were the first to go into the mountain, and they did so for several hundred years, giving up the quarry in the fourth century. Its rock is a less than pure-white chalk, tanned by enough clay to be called a marl. In a group, you follow a guide with two electric lanterns, suspended from bails like railroad lanterns. He hands one to the last guidee in line, then leads the way into darkness, cracking jokes in English. His name is Leon Frissen. He is short, stocky, balding, and friendly. You follow him down and down through a gallery system, and if you’ve ever been in a salt mine the place reminds you of a salt mine. The constant temperature is ten degrees Celsius and you shiver. Now you are about thirty-five metres below the surface. The gallery walls are seven metres high. The lantern light is the only light. It throws awkward, lurching shadows. Seeing me struggle to write notes, Frissen takes a flashlight out of his pocket and gives it to me. Rounding a corner, we look down a straight corridor into a mournful and infinite gloom. Frissen says the corridor goes on for several kilometres before the next bend. He says there are three hundred and fifty kilometres of galleries in and beyond the mountain, hewn, by blokbrekers, with three tools: chisel, hammer, and saw. The quarrying resumed in the thirteenth century and continued until 1926.

Allied pilots, shot down during the Second World War, were taken into the tunnels and led underground to Resistance forces in nearby Belgium. The route was known as the Pilots Line. On tunnel walls, it was blazed by drawings of doves. In the Sint Pietersberg galleries, you see doves not only on the walls but also on the thick and natural pillars of chalk left standing to prevent the collapse of the mine. From 1942 to 1945, Dutch museums hid more than seven hundred works of art inside the mountain, including Vermeer’s “The Little Street” and Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” a huge canvas (fifteen square metres) that spent the rest of the war rolled up as a stalagmite. After surface telephone lines were destroyed by German bombs, a line was run through the grotten keeping connections open with Belgium and northern France. Maastrichtians and other people of the province hid in the mountain, especially while battle raged through Limburg.You see a niche chapel far underground, and Stations of the Cross. There was a bakery, a hospital, and three churches, two of them Roman Catholic. Twelve thousand people were inside the mountain in late summer, 1944. Maastricht was freed by Allied troops, mostly American, on the fourteenth of September. A few kilometres east of the mountain, in the Netherlands American Cemetery, eighty-three hundred soldiers are buried in the chalk.

Graffiti in the tunnels in the mountain—drawings, advertisements, people’s names—can be arranged as a sort of timescale of the ages of quarrying, just as the scale of the ages of the Cretaceous rise through Berriasian, Valanginian, Hauterivian, Barremian, Aptian, Albian, Cenomanian, Turonian, Coniacian, Santonian, Campanian, and Maastrichtian time.

There are names on the walls from 1551.

Among swinging shadows in lantern light, the name of Don Ferdinand Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, appears with the date 1570. (His headquarters were on the mountain. Spanish troops massacred thousands of Maastrichtians on a single day in 1579.)

Someone called Olivier left his name in the grotten in 1660.

As did Ianno in 1681, with a word about the quality of his oil. (Ianno was a merchant. To the blokbrekers, he sold linseed oil for their lamps.)

Rosa de Horlon was here, her name on the wall: 14 mei 1781. Napoleon Bonaparte 1803.

Martha: “Why was Napoleon here?”

Guide: “Why are you here?”

Martha considers this an inadequate answer.

Too busy scribbling, I keep my question to myself: If Napoleon knew what was inside the mountain, and other tourists toured the quarry in the nineteenth century, why were the Nazis unaware of the Maastrichtian refuge and the Pilots Line? (According to Rik Valkenburg’s “Ondergronds Verzet: Illegale Transporten door de Grotten van de Sint Pietersberg-Maastricht in 1940–1944,” Maastrichtians convinced the Germans that it had become physically impossible to move people or goods to Belgium through the mountain. They took the head of the local Gestapo on a selective tour of the grotten and drove home the point. German soldiers did occasionally patrol parts of the vast subterranean maze, but the Resistance knew their routes and schedules. Travellers on the Pilots Line shrank back into lightless caverns.)

There are names on the walls from 1854.

From the eighteen-seventies, there’s an ad for Bols gin. A remarkably detailed, beautifully drawn, anonymous charcoal landscape is dated 1904.

Ferocious mosasaur, sketched on a tunnel wall in 1907—the big-headed, long-toothed, long-bodied predatory reptile that lived in the Cretaceous ocean and its epicontinental seas. “Mosasaur,” misleadingly, means reptile of the river Maas—actually a marine creature, not riverine, discovered inside Sint Pietersberg in the eighteenth century, fifty years before the earliest description of dinosaurs. Mosasaurs were as much as fifty feet long, swimming like snakes toward the Cretaceous Extinction.

On the chalk near the mosasaur: a 1948 drawing of the Dutch royal family, the present queen, Beatrix, as a princess ten years old.

[Joanne Fate]

I put this aside to listen to some other books. Another excellent collectiion

[Charles Matthews · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was a magazine editor, I always held up McPhee as a model for my writers: Find a subject that hasn't been overdone, I would say, then research the hell out of it and write about it beautifully. Easier said than done, of course. McPhee is the master of the "gee-whiz" article: the one that tells you all sorts of stuff that you didn't know you didn't know, or that you are fascinated to find out about. Granted, even I didn't want to know as much about the Swiss army as McPhee decided to tell his New Yorker readers. And maybe McPhee got too fascinated by geology, leaving some of us wishing for more stuff like Oranges or The Pine Barrens. And maybe Tracy Kidder has lately been leaving McPhee in the dust. But I don't know anyone who writes better prose -- fiction or non-fiction.



The prose is still good in this volume, but it's on the whole disappointing. What strikes me most, especially about the longer pieces in the book, is the lack of structure in McPhee's essays. In "Season on the Chalk," he hops about from place to place in England and France with only the loosest of transitions; he lards "Spin Right and Shoot Left" with lists and catalogs, such as the roster of fifty-three colleges that sent coaches to an exhibition of potential varsity lacrosse players; his piece on the U.S. Open golf tournament, "Rip Van Golfer," is distractingly scattered among observations of place, observations of players, and observations of himself as observer. It doesn't help that I have little interest in either lacrosse or golf, but McPhee used to be able to hold my interest in even things that I wouldn't be inclined to read about.


Still, no magazine writer that I know of finds more curious and illuminating things to say about whatever he writes about. I just wish for an editor that would prune his excesses.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as good as the best McPhee, but still better than most writing, fiction or non-fiction.

“Checkpoints”, about New Yorker magazine fact-checkers, made me laugh out loud. Read it. Given the way things are these days, even a single laugh should be pursued for all it's worth. “My Life List”, about unusual things he has eaten while doing the journalism thing, was also amusing.

McPhee is a loving grandfather now. I'm the sort of big grump who'd rather read about the Swiss Army, oranges, or nuclear physics, than a description of someone's adorable moppet of a grandchild, so these moments had limited interest to me. But I thought the one about his daughter, who for some reason lugs around a really old-school camera, the type you peer through under a black drape, was pretty interesting.

Worth getting out of the library and picking up from time to time.

[H (trying to keep up with GR friends) Balikov · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like McPhee no matter what he chooses to write about. These are former New Yorker pieces that I missed. Some would downgrade the book because it lacks cohesion, but not me. He writes so well whether discussing the geology of chalk or the historical significance of lacrosse that I can't get enough.

[Ann Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just love McPhee. I found myself reading a long essay on lacrosse with deep, almost emotional interest. And lacrosse has never appealed to me before. That's what great writing can do.

But my favorite pieces are two short memoir-type essays, one on canoeing and one the title essay.

I fervently hope Mr. McPhee never dies.

[Leland William · Rating 3 out of 5]

John McPhee is a wonderful writer. In this collection of essays, he takes us on tours of the chalky Cretaceous deposits that underly the English Channel and spans Southern England and Northern France, the history and emerging popularity of lacrosse, the painstaking process of capturing images with a Deardorff camera, and the thorough nature of the New Yorker fact checking team to name a few.

The uniting factor in these essays is McPhee's plain and elegant prose. He has a marvelous way of leading the reader patiently down into the weeds of whatever topic he has chosen, and once he is down there, teaching you something.

I didn't give this collection a high rating because unlike Coming Into the Country, it had no thematic through-line. Silk Parachute is a collection of random essays from the New Yorker, and they are each insularly delightful, but do not really make an impression as a whole, unless you are student of McPhee's style. But for this alone, I would recommend the book. McPhee is a good reminder that you don't have to do anything fancy to write with poise and beauty.

[Sairam Krishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first complete McPhee, and this was fun. Narrative non-fiction, slowly, meticulously, almost wondrously crafted. You can feel it in the rhythm of the words sometimes. A couple of pieces in Silk Parachute are squibs, but the two long pieces on Lacrosse and Golf more than make up for them.

Anyway, there's a lot more of him to read, and this one may be a good start.

[Mike Dennisuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic listen. This a collection of John McPhee’s work read by … John McPhee. The author has the skill of taking any subject, from Oranges to basketball to geology, and making it interesting. Hearing read his own work is delightful. The cadence of his speech and his inflections give us a sense of wry humor. OUTSTANDING!

[John Brugge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Agree with another reviewer who said this is a very personal book of McPhee's. Also very playful, with lots of dry humor.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh, disappointing.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like several of the author's books, this particular volume is a collection of somewhat disparate essays of different lengths and content.  All of them are testament to the way that McPhee writes, which is itself a worthwhile element.  In many ways, McPhee is a writer's writer, someone whose thinking process and the way he goes about writing are of worth to others in helping to encourage their own creative processes.  All kinds of experiences can be the triggers for the sorts of personal essays at which McPhee excels, including the simple joys of childhood, the experience of riding on a jump seat as a basketball player, or travels that prompt interesting questions about how it was possible for the Dutch to fool the Nazis about tunnels in chalk mines that were familiar even to Napoleon (yes, that Napoleon).  McPhee appears here as someone who takes what he sees and what he experiences as the raw material for investigations into areas of life, and if he is someone who has had a lot more interesting experiences than most people, it is what he makes of the raw materials of his life that informs so much of his writings and that makes them so useful for others.

This particular short volume of about 200 pages contains ten essays.  The first, "Silk Parachute," is apparently the most anthologized of McPhee's writings, and it refers to his own memories of his mother and of his own childhood.  "Season On The Chalk" shows the author examining chalk around Europe from the cliffs of Dover to the mines of the Dutch that were famous even in the early 19th century.  "Swimming With Canoes" shows the author as a teenager deliberately swamping canoes and swimming with them, developing such a skill in dealing with tips that he does not panic in the water.  "Warming The Jump Seat" shows the author germinating the idea for a book about his experiences in a prep school from his experience riding with his coach in the jumpseat of a car.  "Spin Right And Shoot Left" gives a detailed explanation of the author's experience in lacrosse as a player and as an observer of the play and history of the game.  "Under The Cloth" gives the author's entertaining thoughts and observations in long-exposure photography.  "My Life List" is a collection of odd foods that the author has tried, along with stories about how it was that he ate bee spit.  "Checkpoints" is an essay I have read in another collection that reflects on the process of error checking, full of humorous anecdotes about the obscure Illinois Rivers that one can find in the United States.  "Rip Van Golfer" reflects on the travails of one year's US Open where golfers were more than usually battered by a difficult course in difficult conditions.  And the last essay, "Nowheres," gives a humorous comparison between the geology of New Jersey and Tennessee.

Does one need an excuse to read McPhee's writings?  Almost any excuse will do--these essays are full of generosity of spirit, genuine curiosity into memory, the perspectives of others, and the reality of life and existence.  The author shows himself humane in looking at a stern old coach and in examining the aspects of racism that led to Iroquois (and other tribes) being prevented from playing in the elite levels of a game that they themselves had created.  The author shows considerable generosity of spirit in giving praise to others for helping him become successful, and shows a love of telling funny stories from his own experiences and travels.  And it is easy to feel like a better person for having enjoyed the author's gentle wit and expansive curiosity and generosity of spirit.  One can feel from these pages that the author is someone one would like to talk to, listen to, and someone who would be a fair writer and interviewer, and all of that no doubt has helped the author write about so many people and so many situations, because other people feel the same way, being amused by his quirks even as they are pleased by his talented writing.

[Matthieu Cornillon · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a worn-out truth, so well-used you can find it in a pull quote on the book jacket: “Is there any subject McPhee cannot make interesting?” I’ve read several of his books, but I’ve finally put my finger on why—for me, at least—the answer is yes. He manages to see his impossibly varied subjects with the eye of the true nerd on the topic: the type of deeply involved connoisseur who rambles gleefully when you get them started, not to show off but because they can’t help themselves but to share with you the intricacies of a realm they love. The type of personal tour guide who helps you see subtleties that you have to squint hard to see from your uninitiated position, that you would only have come to otherwise with years of personal immersion. In this way, McPhee not only makes an interesting piece of writing, but actually sparks interest in the topic itself. I’ve never had the faintest interest in lacrosse, but after reading “Spin Right and Shoot Left”, I watched bits of several games on YouTube, starting to see the details that McPhee had brought to my attention. I particularly loved “Check Points” for the behind-the-scenes look at what happens to get his pieces out, and the acknowledgment of the fact checkers that make his work possible. And throughout, I liked just being with McPhee, with his wonderfully dry humor.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

John McPhee is one of the very few and I do mean few who can take an obscure topic and make it interesting. Case in point...I love sports but never really got the big deal about lacrosse until I read his essay in this book. I'm almost becoming a fan of the sport. I love how McPhee can go off on a tangent and several pages come back to the story / point he was trying to make and picks up where he left off. And not once but several times in the same story.
Here's a book where he mentions not just his children but his grandchildren for the first time. Great story about his daughter and her photography partner acting like an old married couple....maybe we should move it her....no, no, no....better here.
And the story on his bucket list of foods he's eaten whether he's really wanted to or not. And the time he grilled moose burgers and fed them to his kids unsuspectingly. McPhee's dry wit came out in that story.
McPhee also references other stories he's written that became books in several of short stories / essays in this book and that too brought back and refreshed my memories of those books. Either way all of the stories he wrote in Silk Parachute were still refreshing and fascinating. Hopefully even after fifty years he still has some left in him.

[Steve Voiles · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you love John McPhee's writing, add this to your list. If you are just curious, but don't have topic in mind, you can get an idea of why people love McPhee as a writer, irregardless of topic.

This is a nice collection of varied topics, the totally demonstrating the roving mind and the meticulous collection of sometimes startling details that set McPhee off as a writer among writers and an unparalleled nonfiction writer.

Among the topics here: LaCrosse—historical and contemporary detail and about a sport you didn't know you might be interested in; proof reading—yes, and fascinating; photography as high art with ancient tools that bring unique challenges; geology on the bottom of the English channel and how it came to be (both the undersea formations and the channel itself); chalk—yep, a lengthy examination of chalk from every point of view.

Not the first of his books I'd recommend, but if you if you are a first time McPhee reader, you will likely be drawn to others.

[Michael John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first encounter with John McPhee. I have been looking forward to reading his work after running across his classic explorations of geology. This collection of essays runs the gamut of interesting topics. It goes from canoes to lacrosse to golf to literary fact checkers. Of course my favorite essay was on the chalk formations in England and France - being the geology nerd that I am. However I found all of the essays to be readable and informative, even the sports ones as I am not a huge fan. I have to say though, as a writer he kept the topics interesting and I now know much more about lacrosse than I did before. His writing style is a bit more academic than a lot of the essayists that I read, but his voice compliments them all quite nicely. I am excited to seek out his books on geology and the environmental movement.

[Al · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a collection of random writings, short and long, by McPhee. One suspects he was just cleaning off his desk when he published this book; many people will read anything McPhee writes, and he seldom disappoints. In this case, however, there is so much diversity in this collection that generalizing about it is impossible. It seems thrown together, and the appeal of this mishmash is uneven. There are long pieces on lacrosse, specialized photography, and the U. S. Open golf tournament at Oakmont, and there are personal musings, long and short. My suggestion is that the best way to approach Silk Parachute is to take it out of the library, and open it expecting to read and enjoy about half of it. Who knows which half? That's up to you.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to the audiobook read by the author. I found it hard to listen to this book. The author would be talking about one subject, and then before I knew it, it was a completely different subject, and I had to rewind in order to figure out what the connection was.He has some interesting thoughts to share, but it’s rather disjointed with quick switches between topics. Perhaps there’s a paragraph divider in the printed version that makes it more obvious, but listening to the audiobook it’s awkward.

That said, there’s still interesting things to be learned from this book. Learning about the behind-the-scenes fact, checking for magazines and books was interesting, especially the story about the hot air balloons from Japan that landed near the Hanford nuclear site.

[Lenora Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a delightful collection of essays by John McPhee. A real treat. I have several of his books, and this is a great addition to my library. McPhee writes on a myriad of topics—from childhood (his) to the rules of La Crosse. He picks topics I've never considered that I needed to know anything about—and you know what? I did need to know about them!

If you enjoy great writing, read John McPhee. Get hooked on his stuff. Believe me, it's a good addiction. Many of his essays are long, book length, single topic (Oranges is one), this is a compilation of shorter ones. I've yet to be disappointed in reading McPhee.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of essays from master wordsmith John McPhee ranges across various subjects, including golf, lacrosse, photography, geology, and strange foods he has eaten. He’s a dazzlingly good writer regardless of subject, but I found the autobiographical essays like the title piece the most engaging.

[Gary Spagnoli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything McPhee writes I'll give 5 stars to - but there are some essays that're weak and meandering... the chalk on the coasts of England was very boring to me, and my limited knowledge of the geography didn't help me stay interested...

This still gets 5 stars because his essay on lacrosse alone was fantastic. Lax Rats forever. His sports writing is always top notch.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag of essays by an author I really like. I enjoyed his essay on the chalk lands of England and France; canoeing as a youth (which brought back fond memories for me); and fact checking. Several seemed quite personal for him. Overall most were pretty good, though I gave up on a couple of others.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book I ever had by John McPhee, and other than the rather large chapter on lacrosse, I really enjoyed his writing and the various essays. I appreciated his focus on detail, detail that I wouldn't notice or bother to point out if I did. Especially toward the end of the book his writing and observations evokes several instances of audible laughter. So that's a plus.

[Riley T · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I absolutely adore the eponymous essay in this collection, Silk Parachute. The others were vast in their scope and incisive in their dissection of topics but just didn't hit as hard as the first. I still greatly enjoyed McPhee's writing style and look forward to picking up more of his work.