I own and have read everything McPhee has written. I subscribe to New Yorker mostly for the annual or biennial piece by McPhee. I like the geology series very much, and parts of Birch Bark Canoe still make me laugh out loud, but Country is his best book.

McPhee's many gifts including finding and understanding interesting, compelling people, and writing about them eloquently and non-judgmentally. He uses those people and what they say to convey his larger themes. Stan Gelvin and his dad, Willie Hensley and, of course, the folks in and around Eagle. He somehow wrangled a seat on the state capital relocation committee's helicopter. He somehow charmed the irascible Joe Vogler into candor. I talked with Vogler - who has since been murdered in a gun deal gone bad - about McPhee's interview, and he told me that McPhee took no notes during interviews over a week, and yet "pretty much got it right."

I've lived in Alaska most of my life. I've read the gushy stuff (Michener, for example), the political diatribes (Joe McGinnis, for example), and the gee-whiz tourist fodder. McPhee, instead of trying to paint the whole state, paints a series of miniatures which give you a much accurate glimpse than the writers and hacks who try to "describe" Alaska.

Maybe it's that America's best non-fiction writer brought his special tools and skills to the right opportunities; maybe it's just luck. It all came together in this book. The last bit, his walk down to the river and the growing worry, verging on panic, that this is wilderness, that a bear could be around the next corner, that he is not in control and can never be in control; the eloquence and the message are what makes Alaska. No one has described it better.

If you want to try to understand Alaska, its people, its politics and why I live here, this book is the best place to start. This book is a great writer's greatest book.

83 of 83 found the following review helpful:


Fascinating reporting on an Alaska that no longer exists  May 25, 2004 By bensmomma "bensmomma"
In the mid 1970s, John McPhee turned his powers of description toward Alaska at a time when the "Alaskan way of life" was under siege. Alaska had been a state less than 20 years. The claims of natives to the land had been resolved by putting millions of acres in the hands of native corporations. The old "tradition" of immigrants to the land being able to plop down and build a cabin almost anywhere was disappearing under the burden of new regulations. Huge new national parks were designated, and at the same time the pipeline was being constructed, highlighting the old conflict between development and ecology, between preservation and self-determination.

Sadly, the Alaska that McPhee wrote about no longer exists. In the first segment, he writes about the Brooks Range wilderness, and discusses the controversy around establishing the "Gates of the Arctic" National Park there. That park is now established. In the second segment, he writes about the aftereffects of the decision to move the state capital from Juneau to somewhere north of Anchorage. That move never occurred. In the third (and longest and most compelling) segment, he reports on the lives of the people of isolated Eagle, Alaska, a town that today boasts a fax machine.

The third segment is where McPhee's writing really shines: I don't think anyone has ever conveyed the personality of Alaska and Alaskans as well as McPhee has. My favorite was the story of how one man and his son managed to get an entire C9 Caterpillar bulldozer into the middle of nowhere, clearing their way through 70-foot winter drifts, to set up a gold dredging operation. McPhee conveys the extreme beauty and wildness of the place, and the fire and determination of the people to belong to it.

I was sad but impressed to find McPhee accurately foretelling the Exxon Valdez tragedy by predicting that an oil spill in Prince William Sound was the greatest threat to Alaska's environmental health. However, McPhee's account is remarkably balanced; if you're looking for polemic (either pro or anti-environmentalism, for example), you won't find it.

In sum, I give this book five stars for the quality of the writing and the insight, but four for being somewhat dated. If you want to learn more about what Alaska was like, you couldn't do better than this, but if you want to know what it's like NOW, you might prefer to supplement this otherwise wonderful book with something else.

35 of 36 found the following review helpful:


Growing Up in the Country  Jul 02, 2001 By Eartha Lee
In the late 1970's my mother and father were inspired by John McPhee's Coming Into the Country to the point of venturing out onto the open highway. I was but two years old, headed across America, from Georgia to Alaska, towards Eagle, the tiny community that McPhee discusses with a keen eye in the third section of his book. I spent my childhood in that community and it would not be until I was fully grown that I would actually read his book. Just a couple of years ago, when I was attending college in Georgia, I became homesick for Alaska and decided to read the book that had been so impressive to my parents. I was amazed by McPhee's way of seeing the truth in something foreign to him -- how he described the people of Eagle. I highly recommend this book to all those who wish to venture into the land of Alaska, whether in their actual travels or in their imagination.

20 of 20 found the following review helpful:


A surprisingly satisfying trip  Jan 04, 2000 By Doug Vaughn
John McPhee is a writer who seems able to interest readers in anything that captures his attention. The range of subjects that his books cover is striking and his skill at involving readers in subjects that they might heretofore have thought uninteresting is, in my opinion, unique. This book, recounting a journey through Alaska - as a pretext for broader commentary about Alaska and its relationship with the lower 48 - is an excellent introduction to the state we only think we know. I read this during a long stretch of living and working in Alaska and found it to be the most insightful and interesting book on the subject that I had found. As is true with all of McPhee's books, this one satisfys on many levels, from the clarity of the prose to the fascinating subject matter. Great stuff.

19 of 19 found the following review helpful:


An outstanding work of reportage  Feb 05, 2001 By E. Hawkins
Again and again we hear it, but it's true: John McPhee can interest a reader in anything. He manages to combine a richly sedimented prose, which frequently rises to a level of virtuosity of which 95% of novelists would be envious, with a tangible involvement in the activities of the people he writes about. And he does always write, first and foremost, about people. 'Coming into the Country' is McPhee's longest single book and contains about ten capsule biographies (and quite a bit of modest autobiography, too) in addition to observations on the hibernation of bears, the various techniques of panning for gold, the advantages of sled-dogs against snow-machines, the failings of bush-pilots, and three-dozen other disquisitions.

Without wishing to carp, I do think that the book is a shade too long -- the final section 'Coming into the Country' could profitably have been pruned of about forty pages -- but the greater length does allow the reader to see the effort McPhee goes to to provide his stories with an aesthetically pleasing structure. The first section, 'The Encircled River' deposits us, in medias res, halfway down a tributary of one of Alaska's northenmost rivers. McPhee and his companions travel downriver to the confluence of a larger river, and then we head back to the headwaters of the earlier river -- the story describes an encircling pattern. The second part 'What they were looking for' is a very funny record of a helicopter trip taken by a committee established to decide on a new capital for Alaska. Here the story skips around the theme as the chopper skips around proposed sites for the new metropolis. It's in the final section which gives the book its title that McPhee really lets loose, leaping from the present to the past, from those living on the river to those encamped in the small town of Eagle, back to the Indian village, on to a white mountain trapper and his Indian wife, back to the first goldrush era in the Yukon valley, all the time incorporating off-the-record views of Eagle townspeople, journal entries, his own observations of the breathtaking landscape. It's a tour-de-force. McPhee is the best journalist in the English-speaking world. Alaska is a wonderful place. The meeting of the two is something to behold.

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