Catching Up With An Old Friend: Dave Rosenthal on Coming into the Country

Catching Up With An Old Friend is a series in which readers, authors, and other bookish people share their favorite books. Read more about the project or see all the past entries. To participate, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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Today's favorite book is from Dave Rosenthal, an editor at the Baltimore Sun, who supervises lifestyle coverage and topics such as health and the environment. He has been writing the Read Street blog for nearly two years, and has found that blogging about books means he has much less time to actually read books. Still, he enjoys it.

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My favorite book is Coming into the Country by John McPhee. As a reader, I loved that the book took me to a place I had never been — Alaska — and made me understand important social, cultural and political currents running through the state. As a life-long journalist, I was impressed by his impeccable reporting — the detail that brought scenes and characters alive — and writing that was thoughtful without being flowery. (I’ve admired this in his other books, including The Pine Barrens.) When I finally got a chance to visit Alaska, I re-read the book and found that it was dead-on.