The Survival of the Bark Canoe is a brief book, only 114 pages. White, Lewis Thomas or John McPhee would enter our heads and come out through our pens back in those halcyon days when we rode dinosaurs to classes.) The use of these has been widely discontinued – an act, I suspect, owing as much to the despair writing teachers feel of ever encountering a writer who could, to borrow a metaphor from Rogers Hornsby, at least “carry the bat” of a White or Thomas – or McPhee – as to changes in the pedagogical approach to teaching writing. They were books of essays by great nonfiction writers assigned in 1st year composition classes to provide “writing models” to callow 18 years olds in the quaintly delusional hope that some of the greatness of an E.B. (Some of the more hoary of you working through this piece may remember those books called readers. My composition class “reader” had an excerpt from Oranges about fighting a frost in Florida with smudge pots that hooked me on his approach to nonfiction. I have been a John McPhee fan since I was an undergraduate. Here’s one from the 2014 reading list that I’ve been looking forward to reading. The Survival of the Bark Canoe by John McPhee (image courtesy Goodreads)
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