John McPhee has long been known for taking very specific topics and sussing out everything that makes them interesting. With his 28th book, McPhee widens the filter and turns his gaze on himself. Silk Parachute (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25) sheds light on where the ideas for previous books have come from: McPhee’s experience with canoes as a child, his year at Deerfield Academy, his first glimpse of Bill Bradley playing basketball at Princeton. This book is like a perfect copy of The New Yorker where every story is captivating and every word is worth reading.
In college, I'd wander into the library stacks to write papers only to be distracted by Joseph Frank’s brilliant concatenation of intellectual history, literary criticism, painstaking archival work and soul-searching, which happened to occupy my corner of the stacks. Joseph Frank is the greatest biographer of Dostoevsky in any language; and the academe long viewed with trepidation the prospect that Frank would die before completing his magnum opus. Dostoevsky, the work of thirty-two years and five volumes, seems a worthy use of a life. Now Frank, 91, has overseen a masterful condensation of the 2,500 page original into a single volume fit for popular (albeit of the NYRB sort) consumption. Despite his prodigious literary productivity, Dostoevsky’s life did not lack incident: epileptic fits, the murder of his father, revolutionary intrigue, Siberian exile, gambling away his last pennies in Europe… It all reads a little bit like a Dostoevsky novel.
