text: All three essays that comprise "The Control of Nature" originally appeared in The New Yorker. After its publication as a book in 1989, The Control of Nature was McPhees second-best selling book, after Coming into the Country'. It received generally positive reviews from book critics.
  Los Angeles Times critic Jack Miles praised McPhee's "knack of presenting even the most ordinary folks in their best, most ingenious moments." He liked "Los Angeles Against the Mountains" the most out of the three essays. He enjoyed how McPhee explained scientific and engineering concepts so a layperson could understand them.
  Martin Ruess, writing in Technology and Culture, thought that McPhee should have added more interpretation to his descriptions. "McPhee has the poets knack for the telling point, the metaphor that incisively leads to greater understanding," Ruess wrote. He believed that McPhee underestimated humanitys ability to exert its control on natural settings, since the U.S. infrastructure effectively did this. Ruess concluded that "McPhees reports from the battlefronts are not as valuable as their implicit message that the control of nature is not nearly as important as knowing ones place in it."