John McPhee has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 1 author, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is Uncommon Carriers.
Uncommon Carriers
Summary
From Pulitzer Prize-winner John McPhee, author of The Founding Fish, comes the fascinating story of an often overlooked, yet vitally important part of America. This first-hand account of the transportation sector features evocative portraits of the men and women who deliver our consumer and industrial goods. McPhee begins his adventure riding with Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of an 18-wheeler hauling nearly 30 tons of highly toxic chemicals from North Carolina to Washington. He continues his journey on a towboat pushing over 1,000 feet of barge up the narrow channel of the Illinois River. He rounds out his account crawling through Nebraska, Kansas, and the Powder River Basin of Wyoming in massive coal trains. Along the way, he tells the stories of the people he meets and the places he visits. McPhee's sense of humor, incisive observations, and historical asides make for a highly entertaining journey across America.
©2006 John McPhee (P)2006 Recorded Books LLC
The Founding Fish
Summary
Few fish are as beloved, or as obsessed over, as the American shad. Although shad spend most of their lives in salt water, they enter rivers by the hundreds of thousands in the spring and swim upstream heroic distances in order to spawn, then return to the ocean. John McPhee is a shad fisherman, and his passion for the annual shad run has led him, over the years, to learn much of what there is to know about the fish known as Alosa sapidissima, or "most savory". In The Founding Fish McPhee makes of his obsession a work of literary art. In characteristically bold and spirited prose, inflected here and there with wry humor, McPhee places the fish within natural history and American history. He explores the fish's cameo role in the lives of William Penn, Washington, Jefferson, Thoreau, Lincoln, and John Wilkes Booth. He travels with various ichthyologists, including a fish behaviorist and an anatomist of fishes; takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and cooks shad and shad roe a variety of ways. Mostly, though, McPhee goes fishing for shad, standing for hours in the Delaware River in stocking waders and cleated boots, or gently bumping over rapids in a chocolate-colored Kevlar canoe. His adventures in the pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing, at once expert and ardent, in which he has no equal.
©2002 John McPhee (P)2002 Recorded Books
The Patch
Summary
An "album quilt", an artful assortment of nonfiction writings by John McPhee that have not previously appeared in any book. The Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master. It is divided into two parts. Part 1, "The Sporting Scene", consists of pieces on fishing, football, golf, and lacrosse - from fly casting for chain pickerel in fall in New Hampshire to walking the links land of St. Andrews at an Open Championship. Part 2, called "An Album Quilt", is a montage of fragments of varying length from pieces done across the years that have never appeared in book form - occasional pieces, memorial pieces, reflections, reminiscences, and short items in various magazines including The New Yorker. They range from a visit to the Hershey chocolate factory to encounters with Oscar Hammerstein, Joan Baez, and Mount Denali. Emphatically, the author's purpose was not merely to preserve things but to choose passages that might entertain contemporary listeners. Starting with 250,000 words, he gradually threw out 75 percent of them and randomly assembled the remaining fragments as "An Album Quilt". Among other things, it is a covert memoir.
©2018 John McPhee (P)2018 Recorded Books