From the New York Times:
"Even though it has increasingly upstaged poetry and fiction, most book-length journalism is perishable. We drink in the latest gossip about who’s up or down in Washington or the latest account of the Iraq war gone awry, but a decade or two down the road, such information will be subsumed in works of history.
"The New Journalism of the 1960’s and 70’s — articles and books by Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and others — made the biggest collective splash in recent American nonfiction, and certainly enlarged our idea of what the genre could do. The best of it may endure, but, 50 or 100 years hence, will people still be amused by Thompson’s psychedelic ramblings or the early Wolfe’s strings of exclamation points? More lasting, I think, as a grand pointillist mural of our time and place as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people, will be the books of John McPhee.
"For one thing, there are more of them. McPhee has now written, if you count two anthologies of excerpts from a variety of his work, an astonishing 29 books, while some of the most notable New Journalists lapsed into silence. Truman Capote never published another substantial nonfiction book after “In Cold Blood,” nor Michael Herr after his remarkable “Dispatches.” McPhee, however, has steadily averaged close to a book a year. Some of us for whom it’s a struggle to get a book out every four or five years feel he should be prosecuted under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
"McPhee’s choice of subjects is driven by certain personal predilections. Among other things, he is drawn to geology (four books), the practitioners of dying crafts (“The Survival of the Bark Canoe”), eccentrics (“The Headmaster”) and the American wilderness and those trying to save it (“Encounters With the Archdruid”). He also has found wonderfully fertile terrain by simply doing things that small boys dream of. For what other thread connects his flying with a bush pilot, hanging out with blimp enthusiasts