The Control of Nature

Name: The Control of Nature
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: John McPhee
ISBN: 9798855596069

Author: John McPhee

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Unabridged: 9 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/04/2025

Categories: Nonfiction, Nature, Ecology, Environmental Conservation & Protection

Synopsis

The Control of Nature is John McPhee's bestselling account of places where people are locked in combat with nature. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking is his depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those attempting to wrest control from her—stubborn, sometimes foolhardy, more often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

About John McPhee

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, and in the years since, he has written over thirty books, including Oranges, Coming into the Country, The Control of Nature, The Founding Fish, Uncommon Carriers, and Silk Parachute. Encounters with the Archdruid and The Curve of Binding Energy were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Greg on July 31, 2011

If you asked me a week ago, or before I read this book, if I thought this would be a five star book I would have thought you were crazy. Her? This book? I would have probably told you I might never even read this book and that it made me bored to just read the copy on the back. And I can't even tell......more

Goodreads review by ALLEN on September 07, 2018

Although these three extended essays all ran in the NEW YORKER magazine nearly 30 years ago, they retain the power to educate, amuse, and shock, and all show John McPhee, master of nonfiction, at his best. "Atchafalaya" details the growth of the still little-known waterway that runs roughly parallel......more

Goodreads review by Will on January 10, 2016

McFee looks at three huge public works project, the damning and redirectioning of the Mississippi via ongoing construction, primarily by the Army Corps of Engineers; attempts in Iceland to redirect the flow of large volumes of lava away from a town by spraying massive amounts of water at the flow ed......more

Goodreads review by Bryan--The Bee’s Knees on May 29, 2018

I don't know if it was a function of the wrong book at the wrong time, but I found myself often getting bored with this effort of John McPhee's from the late 80s. I always gave McPhee credit for being able to make a wallpaper seminar given in northern England sound like the high point of a trip to E......more