John McPhee books are like crack for the curious. He mines his topics, usually some slice of America or Americana, for all the minutia that the curious crave, diversions and details and especially lists. In Looking for a Ship he turns his pen to the United States Merchant Marine, already a dying institution when McPhee wrote the book in 1990. He manages to secure a spot as a PAC – Person in Addition to Crew on the Stella Lykes for a voyage from port to port down the Pacific coast of South America. The topics he dissects are many: the histories of his fellow seamen, the tribulations of the Merchant Marine, the astonishingly various contents of the hold, and the port towns they visit seen through the eyes of a sailor, to name a few. Interspersed in the story are tales of pirate attacks and boat wrecks, not to mention a discription of the ship’s engine room that will make you sweat just reading it. In this book, as in all his others, McPhee is pitch-perfect, taking the reader down any interesting digression encountered in the narrative, extracting wry humor from his observations, and digging deep into the personal history of any fascinating person he encounters. His books are biographies of a place and time.
Looking for a Ship by John McPhee
In Alexandra Tanner’s ‘Worry,’ Illness Is the Status Quo
In a novel where sisterhood entails constant conflict, illness provides an unexpected emotional salve.
●
●
●
At Long Last, a Translation Worthy of ‘Pedro Páramo’
The latest translation of 'Pedro Páramo' is a mystifying work, in the dual sense that it is confounding and that its language possesses an almost mystical quality.
●
●
●
The Collaborative Alchemy of W.G. Sebald’s Photographs
By rephotographing the material Sebald brought to him, Michael Brandon-Jones played a critical role in helping the writer achieve a tonal consistency between text and image.
●
●
●
Kelly Link’s Romantic Imagination
Though Link’s stories often keep closer bedfellows with Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, her novel is pulpier and more bathetic, in some ways a piece of straight fantasy.
●
●
●
The Everyday Horror of ‘Other Minds and Other Stories’
In someone else’s hands, these stories might be little more than typeset urban legends, the stuff of 2000s-era AOL email chains, but Sims renders them as something both terrifying and mesmerizing.
●
●
●
The Violent Truths of ‘Brutalities’
The impulse to simplify the complicated nature of touch, argues Margo Steines, is not just an intellectual but an ethical failure.
●
●
●
The Truthful Distortions of ‘The MANIAC’
'The MANIAC' is a kind of triptych, presenting us with the conception, painful birth, and exponential growth of the digital computer and its own disquieting offspring, artificial intelligence.
●
●
●
The Visionary Memoirs of Péter Nádas
'Shimmering Details' is a delicate fusion, supplementing the high-modernist realism of Proust and Musil with an expressionist’s commitment to the distortions generated by strong feeling.
●
●
●