I love that so much: the pace of it, the way it sets the scene; I love this whole essay for the way it's about landscape/place, the way it mingles broad historical fact with personal experience. I love how wonderfully precise McPhee can be, with sentences like this: "An armada of swans, in single file, swims out from near the shore and toward the center of the river—thirty-eight swans" (p 10). Ferocious mosasaur, sketched on a tunnel wall in 1907—the big-headed, long-toothed, long-bodied predatory reptile that lived in the Cretaceous ocean and its epicontinental seas. “Mosasaur,” misleadingly, means reptile of the river Maas—actually a marine creature, not riverine, discovered inside Sint Pietersberg in the eighteenth century, fifty years before the earliest description of dinosaurs. Mosasaurs were as much as fifty feet long, swimming like snakes toward the Cretaceous Extinction. This isn’t as much of a problem as it sounds; if these pieces are less ambitious than McPhee’s books, they succeed as especially substantial and elegant nonfiction. This collection provides an enticing introduction to a body of work that can be intimidating by virtue of its sheer volume and journalistic rigor. Warming the Jump Seat" - A short essay about writing about Mr. Boyden, headmaster of Deerfield Academy, profiled in two articles in the New Yorker in 1966, and eventually, put into a book published by FSG titled: The Headmaster: Frank L. Boyden of Deerfield

Silk Parachute’ Is an Uplifting Triumph of John McPhee’s ‘Silk Parachute’ Is an Uplifting Triumph of

Newspaper coverage at the time marvelled at her coolness: “As calmly as if she were going out on the porch to bring in the daily paper… [she] stepped out of an airplane,” wrote the New York Times. Of course, it was nothing new for Gray. She was an experienced stunt parachutist with 32 jumps under her belt, and possibly the only woman parachutist in America during the time she was active. After she landed, reporters asked “the attractive Miss Gray” how she felt, reported the Times. Her response: “all right.” First aid kit “A first aid kit takes up little space and may be important to have in case of illness or injury.” My dad and Grandad Grey said Hitler was not going to get them out of their beds,” said Joan, who was 15 at the time. “All of a sudden a parachute mine sent to cause devastation hit the roof of number 13 next door to us. Everyone waited, expecting the worst, but it never happened. The whole street could have gone up, but an eerie silence was all that happened,” she said. It was the French aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard who claimed the invention of the parachute in 1785. ‘Parachute’ is a French word derived from the Latin ‘para’ which means ‘against’, and ‘chute’ which is French for ‘fall’.Inaddition to the structural analysis of the cloth, the properties measured areweight, breaking strength, tear resistance, elasticity, and air permeability. Map of the Moon’s surface “A map of the Moon’s surface is your primary way to identify your location and to help you navigate.”

Apollo 50 - Potential Plus UK Apollo 50 - Potential Plus UK

Mum told me that the senior officer sent the lower ranks away to safety while he defused the bomb,” said Joan. Eventually the bomb was made safe, but the remains of the mine bomb and the green silk parachute stayed – and the story of the amazing escape for families in Grenadier Street was about to take another twist. Graffiti in the tunnels in the mountain—drawings, advertisements, people’s names—can be arranged as a sort of timescale of the ages of quarrying, just as the scale of the ages of the Cretaceous rise through Berriasian, Valanginian, Hauterivian, Barremian, Aptian, Albian, Cenomanian, Turonian, Coniacian, Santonian, Campanian, and Maastrichtian time. On this day in 1942, in an airfield near Hartford, Connecticut, Adeline Gray fell to earth for the 33rd time.Food concentrate “Although the food concentrate must have water added to be useful, it is lightweight and easy to carry, meeting a third basic need for survival.” As the global leader in parachute fabric supply for both military and commercial aerial delivery systems, HLC is proud to be a fifth generation family company. For more than 100 years, our materials have been trusted in the most demanding and mission-critical applications for military, tactical, and industrial purposes. We’re committed to ongoing research and innovation to provide the best options for our clients. All of our fabrics are woven on state-of-the-art looms under ISO 9001 standards, and they’re finished and tested at U.S. government-certified facilities to ensure they’re safe and effective. Among swinging shadows in lantern light, the name of Don Ferdinand Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, appears with the date 1570. (His headquarters were on the mountain. Spanish troops massacred thousands of Maastrichtians on a single day in 1579.) Two 45.5-kilogram,(100-pound) tanks of oxygen “ With basically no atmosphere on the Moon, oxygen (O2) to breathe is the most pressing survival need. The average person needs about 0.84 kilograms (a little less than 2 pounds) of O2 per day.” When I was a magazine editor, I always held up McPhee as a model for my writers: Find a subject that hasn't been overdone, I would say, then research the hell out of it and write about it beautifully. Easier said than done, of course. McPhee is the master of the "gee-whiz" article: the one that tells you all sorts of stuff that you didn't know you didn't know, or that you are fascinated to find out about. Granted, even I didn't want to know as much about the Swiss army as McPhee decided to tell his New Yorker readers. And maybe McPhee got too fascinated by geology, leaving some of us wishing for more stuff like Oranges or The Pine Barrens. And maybe Tracy Kidder has lately been leaving McPhee in the dust. But I don't know anyone who writes better prose -- fiction or non-fiction.