Whether Fisticuffs or Cufflinks, Style Makes the Man

A Stylish Peter Parker

Out on the Town in Daegu

I spent a couple of the holiday's days in Daegu, the town where my wife grew up. Daegu is a good place to be stuck in for one or two days reading in the NYT about John McPhee's most recent book, The Patch, in a review by Craig Taylor:

Here is the seventh collection of essays by John McPhee, his 33rd book and perhaps his eleventy-billionth word of published prose. This far into a prolific career, it may be a good time to finally unmask the 87-year-old as a one-trick pony. In “The Patch,” he again shamelessly employs his go-to strategy: crafting sentences so energetic and structurally sound that he can introduce apparently unappealing subjects, even ones that look to be encased in a cruddy veneer of boringness, and persuade us to care about them. He’s been working this angle since the 1950s; it’s a good thing we’re finally onto him now.

Taylor is using self-irony to praise Mcphee's good writing, but also good is that McPhee writes far better sentences than this one by Taylor:

This far into a prolific career, it may be a good time to finally unmask the 87-year-old as a one-trick pony.

We do see that Taylor intends to praise McPhee with an ironic manner of expression, but inadvertently manages merely to hang himself, from what appears to be a dangling modifier, with rope provided by the NYT.

Or is the problem more specifically with the overworked, yet lazy pronoun "it"?