The Pine Barrens
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The Pine Barrens
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Narrated by:
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Grover Gardner
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By:
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John McPhee
About this listen
Most people think of New Jersey as a suburban-industrial corridor that runs between New York and Philadelphia. Yet in the low center of the state is a near wilderness, larger than most national parks, which has been known since the seventeenth century as the Pine Barrens.
The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acid to be good for farming. On all sides, however, developments of one kind or another have gradually moved in, so that now the central and integral forest is reduced to about a thousand square miles. Although New Jersey has the heaviest population density of any state, huge segments of the Pine Barrens remain uninhabited. The few people who dwell in the region, the "Pineys," are little known and often misunderstood. Here McPhee uses his uncanny skills as a journalist to explore the history of the region and describe the people—and their distinctive folklore—who call it home.
©1967, 1968 John McPhee (P)2023 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 50
The Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master John McPhee. It is divided into two parts. It is an "album quilt", an artful assortment of nonfiction writings that have not previously appeared in any book.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A thousand details add up to one impression
- By Darwin8u on 11-15-18
By: John McPhee
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Tabula Rasa: Volume 1
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 33
Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design. In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to—people to profile, regions he meant to portray.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A New Yorker writer surveys his office boxes...
- By Darwin8u on 09-04-23
By: John McPhee
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The Founding Fish
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: John McPhee
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 138
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 88
Few fish are as beloved, or as obsessed over, as the American shad. Although shad spend most of their lives in salt water, they enter rivers by the hundreds of thousands in the spring and swim upstream heroic distances in order to spawn, then return to the ocean.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Read and released.
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-14
By: John McPhee
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Basin and Range
- Annals of the Former World, Book 1
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 531
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 348
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 348
To geologists, rocks are beautiful, roadcuts are windowpanes, and the earth is alive, a work in progress. The cataclysmic movement that gives birth to mountains and oceans is ongoing and can still be seen at certain places on our planet. One of these is the Basin and Range region centered in Nevada and Utah.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wow.
- By Julie on 10-12-04
By: John McPhee
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Silk Parachute
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: John McPhee
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute", which first appeared in The New Yorker over a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here - highly varied in length and theme - McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his travels, a US Open golf championship, and a season in Europe "on the chalk" from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Netherlands and France.
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4 out of 5 stars
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It's a landscape with the aspect of memory."
- By Darwin8u on 11-23-18
By: John McPhee
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Irons in the Fire
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 122
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 57
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 56
Fabulously entertaining and filled with the intriguing trivia of life, Irons in the Fire is another impeccably crafted collection of seven essays by John McPhee. His peerless writing, punctuated with a sharp sense of humor and fascinating detail, has earned him legions of fans across the country.
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4 out of 5 stars
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New New Journalism is on Fire
- By Darwin8u on 02-10-15
By: John McPhee
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Levels of the Game
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 18
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Story5 out of 5 stars 18
This account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968 begins with the ball rising into the air for the initial serve and ends with the final point. McPhee provides a brilliant, stroke-by-stroke description while examining the backgrounds and attitudes which have molded the players' games.
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5 out of 5 stars
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McPhee's early work is brilliant.
- By Darwin8u on 06-12-23
By: John McPhee
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Assembling California
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 254
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 216
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 211
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Subduction leads to orogeny zones in California
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: John McPhee
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The Headmaster
- Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 6
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 6
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6
Starting in 1902 at a country school that had an enrollment of fourteen, Frank Boyden built an academy that has long since taken its place on a level with Andover and Exeter. Boyden, who died in 1972, was the school's headmaster for sixty-six years. John McPhee portrays a remarkable man "at the near end of a skein of magnanimous despots who...created enduring schools through their own individual energies, maintained them under their own absolute rule, and left them forever imprinted with their own personalities."
By: John McPhee
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Draft No. 4
- On the Writing Process
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: John McPhee
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 250
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 208
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 209
Draft No. 4 is an elucidation of the writer's craft by a master practitioner. In a series of playful but expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he's gathered over his career and refined during his long-running course at Princeton University, where he has launched some of the most esteemed writers of several generations. McPhee offers a definitive guide to the crucial decisions regarding structure, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces and presents extracts from some of his best-loved work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny.
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4 out of 5 stars
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McPhee is the Craft
- By Darwin8u on 09-19-17
By: John McPhee
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The Second John McPhee Reader, Book Two
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story5 out of 5 stars 21
For a person who has not encountered John McPhee's lively writing, The Second John McPhee Reader is the perfect introduction. McPhee, author of Coming Into the Country, punctuates his delightful prose with a sharp sense of humor, and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice.
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3 out of 5 stars
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An Eclectic Collections of Stories but...
- By Sparkie on 07-20-05
By: John McPhee
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The Second John McPhee Reader, Book One
- By: John McPhee
- Narrated by: Nelson Runger
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 65
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
For a person who has not encountered John McPhee's lively writing, The Second John McPhee Reader is the perfect introduction. McPhee, author of Coming Into the Country, and Assembling California punctuates his delightful prose with a sharp sense of humor and a fascination with things most of us never bother to notice.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Not what I expected
- By Privacy Maven on 11-08-23
By: John McPhee
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Up in the Old Hotel, and Other Stories
- By: Joseph Mitchell
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 28 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 112
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 100
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 99
These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens - as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Listening for the second time!
- By Mebythesea on 09-05-18
By: Joseph Mitchell
What listeners say about The Pine Barrens
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Betsy Fowler
- 05-29-24
Intriguing early John McPhee work
This 1960s work on a large region in New Jersey called the "Pine Barrens" has all the best characteristics of McPhee's later writings: careful research, surprising facts, dry humor, and eccentric characters. Narrator Grover Gardner does a meticulous job of presenting the book.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- cbalch
- 03-16-24
Top notch
I love McPhee’s writing and Gardner’s narration on this and other books is always excellent
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Joe Ivins
- 04-01-24
Informative
A 10th generational piney learned a lot from this book. I wish there were more on this special area of New Jersey.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- kgohl
- 08-22-24
Lovely
Of course it’s lovely—it’s John McPhee. It’s interesting, and somewhat surprising, to compare his fears for the Pine Barrens back in the 60s and 70s with the current state of the place.
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