A covert memoir, The Patch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a nonfiction collection of essays divided into two parts, “The Sporting Scene” and “An Album Quilt.”  It includes pieces on fishing, football and golf, as well as a montage of fragments from past articles. John McPhee ’53 has been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton since 1974. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, winning it in 1999 for his collection Annals of the Former World.