Oranges

Written by John McPhee

Narrated by Grover Gardner

A classic of reportage, Oranges was first conceived as a magazine article, but John McPhee kept encountering so much irresistible information that he wrote a book. It is perhaps the last word on the subject (the first came in 500 BC and is attributed to Confucius). McPhee writes about the botany, history, and industry of oranges, from the great orangeries of European monarchs to a fascinating profile of Ben Hill Griffin of Frostproof, Florida, who may be the last of the individual orange barons.

Oranges developed in Southeast Asia, and they spread through the world with a timing closely parallel to the spread of Western civilization. It was Columbus himself who brought the first orange seeds to the New World. Botanically, they are spectacularly complicated. They can be completely unripe when they are a brilliant orange and deliciously ripe when they are green as emeralds. Citrus is so genetically perverse that oranges can grow from lime seeds. Most Florida oranges grow on lemon roots. Louis XIV hung tapestries of oranges in the halls of Versailles because oranges and orange trees were the symbols of his nature and his reign. This book, in a sense, is a tapestry of oranges, too-with elements in it that range from the customs of French kings to those of people in the modern Caribbean who split oranges and clean floors with them, one half in each hand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350855302

John McPhee

John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. Also in 1965, he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and in the years since, he has written over 30 books, including Oranges (1967), Coming into the Country (1977), The Control of Nature (1989), The Founding Fish (2002), Uncommon Carriers (2007), and Silk Parachute (2011). Encounters with the Archdruid (1972) and The Curve of Binding Energy (1974) were nominated for National Book Awards in the category of science. McPhee received the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. In 1999, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.