John McPhee’s Exhilarating Defense of the Wilderness

What do oranges, deep time, and the Swiss Army have in common? Very little, I would think, except John McPhee, who has written about all of them, along with Wimbledon, family doctors, and nuclear physics. A nonfiction generalist of extraordinarily wide-ranging taste, there seems to be little that McPhee hasn’t covered, or at least contemplated, during his decades-long career (he turns 95 this year) producing stories for The New Yorker, which were then repackaged into several dozen books by Farra...