Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 December 27 • Friday

John McPhee's Levels of the Game is one of my favorite books. An old friend of mine recently gave me McPhee's Looking for a Ship, which is also excellent.

McPhee is really a wonderful writer. A blurb on the back of this edition sums him up rather brilliantly: "the author surrenders to his subject and conquers it".

Looking for a Ship is a literary portrait of the United States Merchant Marine, starting with one sailor looking for a ship to work on. McPhee joins this man and brings us along as they board the S.S. Stella Lykes. We get to know the other people on board—most memorably the captain of the ship, who is quite a character—and discover what for most of us will be a new world, a world that has perhaps already vanished.

The first line is "Andy was worried about the Ben Sawyer Bridge". And McPhee allows himself one rather outrageous pun in this volume: "The author Alex Haley is noted for riding on merchant ships as a way of isolating himself from distractions and forcing himself to write. He could write a book called 'Routes'".