The Times article continued:

The tower that crowned Bear Swamp Hill was "right in the middle of the Pines," the 72-year-old Princeton-born author said yesterday. "And there was a wonderful view - 360 degrees from there for many, many miles and you couldn't see a structure," said McPhee, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who lives in Princeton Township and teaches at Princeton University.

"Tragically, a jet airplane - a fighter plane, a Navy plane, I believe - hit this tower and the tower was taken out like a duck pin. And it's not there any more," he told a small audience at the Princeton Public Library. The group gathered for the kickoff of the state's second annual literacy promotion program - One Book New Jersey 2004, which features McPhee's "The Pine Barrens" as the must-read book for adults.

"It's an amazing book," said Dan Weiss, chairman of the One Book New Jersey Committee and director of the Fanwood Memorial Library in Union County. "It's a whole world focused through the filter of the New Jersey Pine Barrens," Weiss said.

The book, in its 157 pages, packs a blend of seemingly encyclopedic information about the Pine Barrens with sometimes touching and often amusing slice-of-life anecdotes.

The Pine Barrens, which encompass 1.1 million acres in Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland and Gloucester counties, comprise the largest area of open space on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard between Richmond and Boston. At least 90 percent of the Pine Barrens that were mostly pristine wilderness and cranberry bogs at the time McPhee wrote his book remains free of development today, more than 36 years later, said Carleton Montgomery, executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance.

Montgomery said it's doubtful the Pine Barrens would have been preserved to the extent they have if McPhee hadn't written his book. "The Pine Barrens," Montgomery said, influenced former Gov. Brendan Byrne to enact legislation designed to protect most of the Pine Barrens from development. "It is very nearly a miracle that so much of the Pine Barrens survives as it does today," Montgomery said.

McPhee, whose current project is a piece about travels on a tugboat on the Illinois River to be published in The New Yorker magazine, said he is thrilled and grateful that "The Pine Barrens" was chosen for One Book New Jersey.

New Jersey librarians voted to make "The Pine Barrens" the featured book for adults this year over several other nominations, including Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods," and Alice Sebold's "Lovely Bones."

Besides McPhee's book for adults, One Book New Jersey's other featured titles this year are: for Young Adults, "The Body of Christopher Creed" by Carol Plum-Ucci, which happens to be set in the Pine Barrens; for Middle Readers, "Because of Winn-Dixie" by Kate DiCamillo; and the illustrated "How the Cat Swallowed Thunder" by Lloyd Alexander, for Young Readers and Listeners.