"You people come into the market--the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun--and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails.
He lives in Princeton, New Jersey..
In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World.
Mc Phee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977.
Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science.
Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written nearly 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011).
His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965.
About the Author: John Mc Phee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University.
You are something wonderful, you are--people of the city--and we, who are almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales." So opens the title piece in this collection of John Mc Phee\'s classic essays, grouped here with four others, including "Brigade de Cuisine," a profile of an artistic and extraordinary chef; "The Keel of Lake Dickey," in which a journey down the whitewater of a wild river ends in the shadow of a huge projected dam; a report on plans for the construction of nuclear power plants that would float in the ocean; and a pinball shoot-out between two prizewinning journalists.
You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn.
You choose your stringbeans one at a time.
With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. "You people come into the market--the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun--and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails
