"The John McPhee Reader, " first published in 1976, is comprised of selections from the author's first twelve books. In 1965, John McPhee published his first book, "A Sense of Where You Are"; a decade later, he had published eleven others. His fertility, his precision and grace as a stylist, his wit and uncanny brilliance in choosing subject matter, his crack storytelling skills have made him into one of our best writers: a journalist whom L. E. Sissman ranked with Liebling and Mencken, who Geoffrey Wolff said "is bringing his work to levels that have no measurable limit, " who has been called "a master craftsman" so many times that it is pointless to number them.