BOOK LIST

Proust was a NUEROSCIENTIST by Jonah Lehrer

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

Chapter on my rustic furniture with pictures of my

furniture and tips of the trade.

IRONS IN THE FIRE

 

John Mcphee

 

In more than 20 books, ranging in subject from playing tennis to pioneering in Alaska to tracing the workings of the earth's plate tectonics, John McPhee has always done one thing particularly well: he writes with clarity and insight about what people do for a living. Refreshingly free of the modish overuse of the first person, his essays (and the books he makes from them) offer sharply detailed descriptions of interesting, sometimes eccentric, people doing what often proves to be fascinating work -- and doing it well. In ''Irons in the Fire,'' his new collection of seven essays, all previously published in The New Yorker, he continues this probing analysis of men (and occasionally women) at work. In the title piece, he follows and records the routine rounds of a brand inspector in Nevada. It seems that cattle rustling is still big business in Nevada and other Western states, and such an offbeat subject is a perfect match for Mr. McPhee's curiosity. He does not disappoint, and by the time this long essay is finished, readers will have learned a great deal about a career option they might not even have known existed. In the collection's other essays, Mr. McPhee describes, among other things, how forensic geologists help solve murders, how a blind professor communicates with his computer, how scrap dealers handle America's mountains of old tires and how a mason repairs -- of all things -- Plymouth Rock. John McPhee's essays are proof that the kind of journalism that can effortlessly put a topic into perfect perspective will never go out of style. It is always a pleasure to watch him work.

Uncommon Carriers
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
June 2006; 256 pages; 0-374-28039-8; $24.00US; Hardcover

Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the

French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the "tight-assed" Illinois River on a "towboat" pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being "a good deal longer than the Titanic." And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff in 1839.

Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character

American Bloomsbury Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work By This Edition: eBook Publication Date: December 19, 2006 List Price: $9.99 Your Price: $6.49

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Library of Congress All of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques. Sherwood Anderson

Winesburg, Ohio A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life   Sherwood Anderson   This collection of short stories allows us to enter the alternately complex, lonely, joyful and strange lives of the inhabitants of the small town of Winesburg, Ohio. While each character finds definition through their role in the community, we are witness to the individual struggles each faces in trying to reconcile their secret life within.