No better way to gauge the worth of a book has ever been found than the test of time, and John McPhee’s work stands up spectacularly well, I think it’s fair to say, in this passage from a book he published back in l973. It’s called The Curve of Binding Energy, and it’s about the danger of small nuclear weapons constructed by the likes of terrorists, but below is the passage that most stands out, late in the book, about McPhee and physicist Ted Taylor driving into Manhattan, and seeing the World Trade Center:
The book works on several levels: as a factual warning, as a character study, and as pure writing in the non-fiction genre. Because the passage is long, I’m going to put most of it below the fold, but I guarantee, you will not regret the time spent reading it:
Driving down from Peekskill…we found ourselves on Manhattan’s West Side Highway just at sunset and the beginning of dusk. There ahead of us several miles, and seeming to rise right out of the road, were the two towers of the World Trade Center, windows blazing with interior light and with red reflected streaks from the sunset over New Jersey. We had been heading for midtown but impulsively kept going, drawn irresistibly toward two of the tallest buildings in the world. We went down the Chambers Street ramp and parked, in a devastation of rubble, beside the Hudson River. [The buildings were still under construction at the time.] Across the water, in New Jersey, the Colgate sign, a huge neon clock as red as the sky, said 6:15. We looked up the west wall of the nearest tower. From so close, so narrow an angle, there was nothing at the top to arrest the eye, and the building seemed to be some sort of probe touching the earth from the darkness of space. "What an artifact that is!" Taylor said, and he walked to the base and paced it off.
Kit Stolz 