Word: essays
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...McAuley ends his essay with a discussion of a quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald about the rich: “They are very different from you and me.” I will bring my own letter to a conclusion with a line from Hemingway written in response to the very one that McAuley quotes: “Yes, they have more money...
...Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, for routine genetic analysis. When the results came back, Johannes Krause, a researcher at the institute, called his colleague Svante Pääbo on his cell phone. "You'd better sit down," he said. "The finger is not human." (See TIME's photo-essay "The Secrets of London's Buried Bones...
...eponymous essay, “Silk Parachute,” opens the collection. Despite being McPhee’s most anthologized piece, it mainly excels at its style, and its content is not as intellectually rich or complex as the later pieces. It serves as an adequate introduction to the book and establishes an introspective tone that will stand out to readers more accustomed to McPhee’s journalistic mode...
...following from “Under the Cloth;” “They cross the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey and go north on the Palisades Parkway to Rockefeller Lookout in Englewood Cliffs.” The cacophony of place names does nothing to move the essay along, and it might be argued that such attention to detail crosses the line into self-indulgence. However, this trademark specificity is what gives these pieces their grounding...
...Silk Parachute” can be easy to overlook. Near the end of the book, seemingly an afterthought to the fact-heavy pieces that precede it, “Checkpoints” explores the process of fact-checking at “The New Yorker.” The essay is a triumph of form, weaving together a broad swath of anecdotes and characters without feeling like what it is: a hodgepodge. But more importantly, it offers something unusual and valuable—a clean and frank description of the toil of writing about the world...