NONFICTION - Nov. 24, 1985

TABLE OF CONTENTS by John McPhee (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $15.95). John McPhee is one of our leading and most prolific essayists. He is heir to the “New-Age Journalism”--a style roughly bounded by Tom Wolfe, Woodward and Bernstein, and Galen Rowell. Lifelong Princetonian McPhee, a longtime New Yorker regular, has made things physical and out-of-doors his favorite subjects. Recall “Coming Into the Country,” “Basin and Range.” This is a collection of eight pieces written between 1981 and 1984. Two are about bears and the people who work with them, but the wrinkle is that one story--about cubs and winter dens--takes place in Pennyslvania, the other in New Jersey’s bear country. “North of the C. P. Line,” is about another John McPhee, who flies bush planes in Maine. “Ice Pond” tells the tale of physicist Theodore Taylor and his ingenius invention for summer cooling. McPhee excels at descriptive prose; he sniffs all around a subject in his detailed, detached, slightly whimsical way. He’s mighty coy about letting you know how he’s reacting to minihydro power plants or country doctors--two other topics in this varied collection.