McPhee is an North American writer with family roots from the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. The Croft and the Laird is a book he researched and wrote in the early 1970’s when took his family and moved to Colonsay, the remote Scottish island of his ancestors. He writes about the local people of the tiny tight-knit island community with compassion and his usual masterful skill. The island comes to life for us. Reading this book we learn about this particular place, its history and its people; but we learn about human nature at the same time. We learn about what it means to live in one secluded place for generations. We learn how people behave and feel when they have dealings with the same 138 people their entire lives. We learn what it means to be rooted in a place. This is a fascinating book, easy to read and rich with images and concepts. Reading the work of John McPhee is an excellent profitable way to use your time. See the world in company with an expert!
If you are not familiar with the writings of John McPhee, it is truly an honour to introduce him to you. He is perhaps the best writer of documentative non-fiction. His successful career - writing regularly for the Times and the New Yorker; taught non-fiction writing at Princeton; and (nearly) winning a Pulitzer Prize 4 times - is well deserved.
His writing is so good that it has created a new genre of in-depth journalistic writing called ‘creative non-fiction’. This basically means that his writing is as pleasant to read as fiction can be. He has written on a large variety of topics. He goes into a theme, he submerges himself in it, he learns all that he can about it, and he then manages to write magnificently about it. He takes his reader into many worlds. See the world with John McPhee as your guide, and you will surely see what is true, interesting and significant about the places you visit together.
The main reason, I believe, that he writes so well: is that he tells his stories by focusing on people. He creates profiles of interesting people, and puts them together in such ways that you can see their worlds too. I recommend many of his books and essays. Find the one that is on a topic that interests you, and you will be better off for having read it.
