John McPhee

I have some of my dad's old books.   One of them is called "Giving Good Weight".   It isn't a story but instead a collection of "pieces" that were published in the New Yorker magazine back in the 1970s.   The first "piece" is the one titled "Giving Good Weight" and they used that for the title of the book also.  The title refers to New York farmer's market vendors who used analog scales, the kind with a needle.  Nowadays they would use digital scales so the term is probably obsolete. "Giving good weight" referred to when the vendor would give maybe 3 and 1/4th pounds of a particular vegetable or fruit for the price of 3 pounds. 

The book doesn't have a story and would really equate to nothing more than ramblings if the guy who wrote it wasn't a good writer and probably an interesting dude. 

Here is one passage from the book about a particular variety of onion:

   ...Onions. Onions. Multilayered, multileveled, ovate, imbricated, white fleshed, orange-scaled onions.  Native to Asia. Aromatic when bruised.  When my turn is over and a break comes for me, I am so crazed with lust for these bulbous herbs- these enlarged, compressed buds-that I run to an harvested row and pull from the earth a one-pound onion, rip off the membranous bulb coat, bare the flesh, and sink my teeth through leaf after leaf after savory mouth-needling sweet-sharp water-bearing to the flowering stalk that is the center and the secret of the onion...

Most people who would like to be able to write would spend hours to come up with something like that but it still wouldn't be like that.  It would, in most cases, seem contrived or silly.  Even the Pros who get paid to write these days don't write like this guy.  Besides the fact that I find the book entertaining, I also like the idea of reading from the same physical  pages that my dad read from at some point and probably found interesting or somehow otherwise worthy of appreciation.


I had never heard of the guy and reading his book that was published in 1979 made me wonder what it said about him on the internet.   It turns out he is a Pulitzer prize winner and had written quite a bit since then.


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/john_mcphee/search?contributorName=john%20mcphee

John McPhee began contributing to The New Yorker in 1963. Since then, he has written more than eighty pieces for the magazine, nearly all on distinctly different topics. These have included an account of a stint with the Swiss Army, a Profile of a prep-school headmaster, an examination of modern-day cattle rustling, and a Profile of Senator Bill Bradley during his days as a Princeton basketball star, as well as four long articles on geology.
Following two years of writing for television in 1955 and 1956, McPhee joined Time magazine, where he wrote about show business until 1964. He has taught writing at Princeton University since 1975, and was awarded Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Award for service to the nation in 1982.
McPhee has published twenty-eight books, most of them based on his New Yorker writings. Like his articles, his books do not have in common any established themes but, rather, encompass the varied topics that have interested him over the years. Among them are “Annals of the Former World,” (1999), which won a Pulitzer Prize; “Assembling California,” (1993); “Looking for a Ship,” (1990); “The Control of Nature,” (1989); and “Coming Into the Country,” (1977), which was nominated for a National Book Award. Most recently, McPhee published “Uncommon Carriers,” (2006) a collection of pieces profiling freight transportation workers.
McPhee lives in Princeton, New Jersey.