Encounters with the Archdruid
Author: John McPhee
List Price: $14.00
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ISBN: 0374514313
Publisher: Noonday Press (01 October, 1977)
Sales Rank: 43,502
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
a generation passes...
This was the book that introduced me to John McPhee (I grew up around the corner from Dave Brower)and it made me a lifelong fan of McPhees remarkable insights and abilities as a reporter. Here he takes Brower -probably the leading voice for landscape conservation in the second half of the 20th century- and puts him Up Close and Personal with three very remarkable antagonists: the greatest Dam builder in North America, the developer of Hilton Head, and with a mining engineer who has "an affinity for beds" -but has managed to spend nearly 8 years in total sleeping rough in search of minerals world-wide. What is most intriguing about this book is that one comes away with an appreciation of the complexities surrounding environmental issues. This is no polemic or one-sided rant, rather McPhee shows us the strengths and weaknesses of each of his characters, and by weaving the personal in with the political we are left to make up our own minds just who are the heroes and who the villains. Recently I used this book in an Environmental Lit. class & to my surprise about half of the students had never heard of Brower (hence the title of my review. In spite of this they were all captured by the artful transparency of McPhee's prose -they were on that raft with Dominy & Brower, they went up that mountain, they walked that beach, and most important, they had that conversation. Thirty years after its publication this book still has the zip to draw its reader in. Regardless of your position on Things Environmental, I encourage you to give this a good read.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Worth reading
McPhee's skill is in presenting a human drama, with nature as a backdrop. Here, he follows environmental leader David Brower as he interacts with a miner, a developer, and a dam-builder. McPhee tells these stories in an even-handed way, playing up the dialog and letting the conversations and actions tell the story, rather than focus on the issues themselves. It's reasonable to assume that McPhee sympathizes with the environmental perspective beacause of the choice of topics he covers, but he never presents one side more than another.A particular treat is for readers of Reisner's Cadillac Desert, who learned about an entertainingly bold dam-builder, Floyd Dominy. Here, McPhee places him and David Brower at the scene of Brower's greatest disappointment - a dam that he "allowed" to be built. The results, and the tone of the conversation between them, may be suprising.
For readers who want an introduction to McPhee without the focus of this book, Table of Contents (the title of another book) is a good place to start.
Rating: 2 out of 5
too many dam dams
It made me want to hike the Sierra Nevada mountains. The cover of the book enticed me to read this book. The book was very informational about David Brower's life. It was good how the book was divided into three parts to makea it more interesting. John McPhee did a good job of describing how the mountains looked. It helped show how nature is affected by humans and how we shouldn't interfere with it. It was very interesting to see the differemt views of a conservationist verses a copper miner or a developer. Overall, this story has enlightened all of its readers to the effects of human growth and industrialization in the wilderness.
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