From a Washington Post review by Mark Oppenheimer headlined “In ‘Tabula Rasa,’ John McPhee looks back at books not written”:

All writers have false starts. We once stuffed them in manila folders and pushed them deep inside our desks; now we store them in a different kind of folder. But we still rarely give up on them, harboring a shameful hope that someday we’ll perform freelancer’s CPR, breathing new, sellable life into them.