In this collection John McPhee once agains proves himself as a master observer of all arenas of life as well a powerful and important writer. Master essayist John McPhee heard about vehicles in Nevada that resemble police cars, but the cop inside was actually a "brand inspector," a lawman charged with tracking cattle rustlers. Ever curious, McPhee left his home in New Jersey for Nevada and spent a few weeks in those cars. The title essay of this collection is, as we've come to expect from McPhee, well-reported and beautifully written. Also included are essays based on McPhee's observations of a stand of virgin forest in the middle of New Jersey, a huge pile of automobile tires in California, and a long and fascinating look at forensic geologists and how stones tell a story. Most people think cattle rustling belongs to the past or to Wild West movies, yet, as McPhee informs us, the practice still presents problems for cattle ranchers in Nevada, necessitating the state position of brand inspector. In addition to this title essay, McPhee's collection features other unusual topics, such as repairing the crack in Plymouth Rock and tracing murders through geological clues. McPhee, a prolific writer best known for his best-selling Coming into the Country (1977), employs an accessible journalistic style and a scientific sensibility that stimulate interest and understanding in his somewhat esoteric subjects. In the Plymouth Rock essay, for instance, he surrounds his description of the actual repair with a social and geological history of the famous landmark. This book will appeal to curious readers looking for something unusual, especially those interested in the West and the geological sciences. McPhee's essays are entertaining as well as enlightening. For all libraries.?Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. McPhee's twenty-fourth book is a vigorous collection of essays on topics as diverse and intriguing as readers have come to expect from this veteran observer and master of lucid prose who remains as unfailingly curious now about the world as when he first put pen to notebook. An ardent admirer of accomplished geologists, McPhee devotes the most space to "The Gravel Page," an exposition of the meticulous art of forensic geology. As he profiles various experts, he enhances his usual eloquence with some superb procedural crime writing, describing how the subtlest of geological evidence was used to solve the tragic abduction and murder cases of Adolph Coors III and DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar (essays that have appeared in the New Yorker ). Cattle rustling is the subject of the title essay, an eye-opening investigation into the demanding, sometimes dangerous work of Nevadan cattle-brand inspectors. In "In Virgin Forest," McPhee describes how 65 acres of untouched forest remain in, of all unlikely places, New Jersey. It is people who fascinate him the most, however, and so touched was he by Robert Russell, a blind writer who works on a talking computer, he declares: "To watch Russell at work, writing, may be the closest thing to a miracle I have ever seen." Thanks to McPhee, we've seen many wonders, if not miracles. Donna Seaman Nothing, it seems, is beyond McPhee's purview, and these seven essays (which first ran in the New Yorker) offer further evidence that in the right hands even the most prosaic of topics harbors an unsuspected richness of surprising facts and fancies. McPhee (The Ransom of Russian Art, 1994; Looking for a Ship, 1990, etc.) casts his net wide. The title essay describes his journey to Nevada to examine the process of branding cattle. Along the way, he turns up tales of high-tech cattle rustling and offers some typically shrewd glimpses of the lives of ranchers and cattle- brand inspectors. Lyrical to a deadpan fault, McPhee can describe a lowing herd as no other writer: ``They sound like baritone whales. They sound like jets passing overhead without Doppler effect. They sound like an all-tuba band warming up.'' Elsewhere, on more familiar but no less startling ground for his readers, McPhee looks at forensic geology, relating how beer magnate Adolph Coors's killer was tracked down through careful study of the mineral grains deposited on a car's underside, and describes how an FBI geologist helped to solve the murder in Mexico---no thanks to the corrupt Mexican police---of Drug Enforcement Agency agent Enrique Salazar. Perhaps the most fascinating piece here concerns one of the most ubiquitous objects in contemporary society---tires. McPhee visits the largest tire dumps in America, interviews an assortment of surprisingly visionary entrepenuers, and emerges, as usual, with an arcane yet impressive array of statistics; for example, three billion tires sit discarded in the US, from which 178 million barrels of oil could be recovered. McPhee also profiles a blind writer who relies on a humorously idiosyncratic talking computer, describes the efforts of