Synopses & Reviews
What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, at his adventurous best, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation. Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot,
eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the tight-assed” Illinois River on a
towboat” pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being a good deal longer than the Titanic.” And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John,
in a homemade skiff in 1839.
Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its authors warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character. John McPhee is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of twenty-seven books and lives in Princeton, New Jersey. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year This is a book about people who drive trucks, captain ships, pilot towboats, drive coal trains, and carry lobsters through the air: people who work in freight transportation. In recent years, John McPhee has spent considerable time with such people, and Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them, of their work, and of his journeys in their company. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, five-axle, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmatsin Ainsworth opinion " the world's most beautiful truck," so highly polished you could part your hair while looking at it. He attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of fifteen thousand dollars a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes "out in the sort" among the machines that process a million packages a day at UPS Air's distribution hub at Louisville International Airport. He travels up the "tight-assed" Illinois River on a towboat pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being " a good deal longer than the Titanic," longer even than the Queen Mary 2. In Nebraska, Kansas, Georgia, and the Power River Basin of Wyoming, he rides in the cabs of coal trains. And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by twenty-two-year-old Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff 164 years earlier, the journey described in Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Only in scale do the locks of the Middlesex and Union canals of nineteenth-century New England much differ from the locks of Midwestern rivers today. "We often read about people in glamorous professionssurgeons, actors, musicians, writersbut so seldom about those who do the jobs we all depend on, those who transport raw materials on river barges, or haul the coal that generates electricity. If the human race survives another century or two, many of these jobs will vanish (they're already talking about running trains by remote control), and McPhee's work will provide an invaluable record of how those primitive people back in 2006, however heedless they were of what they were doing to their planet to their planet, treasured their bygone crafts . . . I hope he'll take us for rides on some more uncommon carriers at [age] 85, perhaps a space station or a Mars rover or a submersible looking at what we've done to the ocean floor. These seem some of the few places he hasn't yet explored."Adam Hochschild, The New York Book Review "We often read about people in glamorous professionssurgeons, actors, musicians, writersbut so seldom about those who do the jobs we all depend on, those who transport raw materials on river barges, or haul the coal that generates electricity. If the human race survives another century or two, many of these jobs will vanish (they're already talking about running trains by remote control), and McPhee's work will provide an invaluable record of how those primitive people back in 2006, however heedless they were of what they were doing to their planet to their planet, treasured their bygone crafts . . . I hope he'll take us for rides on some more uncommon carriers at [age] 85, perhaps a space station or a Mars rover or a submersible looking at what we've done to the ocean floor. These seem some of the few places he hasn't yet explored."Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review "The veteran New Yorker writer has done it again, delving into seemingly mundane topicsin this case, the various methods of moving freightand emerging with indelible portraits of anonymous, everyday people."Erik Spanberg, The Christian Science Monitor "This book will keep you going much longer [than eight hours]. It is Mr. McPhee at his wise, wry best, writing in top gear."The Economist "[This is an] absorbing and deceptively simple book."Jason Goodwin, The Washington Post Book World "Once again [McPhee] shows how a writer starting with the single most valuable tool in the boxcuriosityemploys a whole array of techniques, and makes what interests him interesting to other people. That's so whether he's writing about barge traffic on the Illinois River or retracing Thoreau's famous journey on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. There's just nobody better at what he does."Jean Bubail, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) "Uncommon Carriers is an uncommonly fine bit of writing. New Yorker magazine writer John McPhee brings a discerning eye and succinct pen to his task. He transforms common carrierstrucks, trains, ships, barges and planes and everythinginto unique vessels . . . Uncommon Carriers is perfect for the summer reader who prefers fact to fiction and who wants to learn some trivia . . . A delightful book."Jules Wagman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "A fascinating book. . . . McPhee is a superb stylist, and his metaphors sing like truck tires."Rob Kyff, Hartford Courant "McPhee rides the rails, sits shotgun in a tanker truck and climbs aboard a river towboat as he investigates the ways in which the staples of modern life travel from one place to another. The seven chapters here, large portions of which have appeared in the New Yorker, for which the author is a staff writer, and the Atlantic Monthly, contain the trademark McPhee touchesunstinting attention to revealing details, a wry sense of humor and a way of rendering prosaic subjects fascinating. He really shines when he finds a character to match his interest in the mechanical, and truck driver Don Ainsworth, a central figure throughout two chapters, plays the perfect foil. As Ainsworth pilots his polished-chrome, 80,000-pounds-when-loaded chemical tanker truck across the country, McPhee reveals the driver's obsession with the Wall Street Journal, his collection of boots made from the skins of exotic animals such as water buffaloes and caimans and the technical skill it takes to steer his leviathan-sized vehicle clear of inattentive drivers and overeager cops ('four-wheelers' and 'bears,' in the driver's lingo). Elsewhere, the author hitches a ride on a coal train a mile-and-a-half long, attends a school in France where tanker-ship captains practice tricky maneuvers on a pond in scale-sized model ships and rides along as a towboat pushes a thousand-foot-long line of barges up the Illinois River. McPhee portrays the main UPS sorting center in Louisville as an enormous Rube Goldberg contraption in which the workers inside, many of them college students slogging through night shifts to pay tuition, appear tiny in the shadow of the behemoth that roars all around them. In the one chapter that drags somewhatperhaps because the central character is long-deceasedMcPhee canoes the Concord and Merrimack Rivers along the route taken by Henry David Thoreau in 1839. Read this colorful journalism and you will never view an 18-wheeler, freight train or UPS truck in quite the same way."Kirkus Reviews "Famed for his geology epics, the popular McPhee here enters the world of heavy freight. Acutely attentive, he watches what an interstate truck driver, a railroad engineer, a towboat captain, and shipmasters do to conduct safely tens of thousands of tons of conveyance and cargo to their destinations. In spare, efficient prose, McPhee indicates, rather than directs readers toward, the skill and experience of the workers. They contend with a magnitude of inertia, and their maneuvers must anticipate peril ahead by miles. McPhee admiringly evokes the balletic performance on the gears and brakes by a truck driver, and on the throttles by a towboat captain as he negotiates the constrictions of the Illinois River; unfortunately, the shipmasters seem accident-prone, grounding and colliding their vessels. Their miscues are more educational than disastrous, thankfully, occurring far from sea near the French Alps, where a maritime school teaches ship handling with models on a pond. Hitching rides to describe how coal is moved, McPhee imparts a sense of the special sociology within each transportation mode, drawing from readers both enlightenment and respect."Gilbert Taylor, Booklist "McPhee sums up eight years of riding around with people who haul freight in vehicles ranging from 18-wheelers to towboats." Library Journal "McPhee's 28th book is a grown-up version of every young boy's fantasy life, as the peripatetic writer gets to ride in the passenger seat in an 18-wheel truck, tag along on a barge ride up the Illinois River and climb into the cabin of a Union Pacific coal train that's over a mile long. He even gets to be the one-man crew on a 20-ton scale model of an ocean tanker in a French pond where ship pilots go for advanced training. As always, McPhee's eye for idiosyncratic detail keeps the stories (some of which have appeared in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly) lively and frequently moves them in interesting directions. One chapter that starts out in a Nova Scotia lobster farm winds up in Louisville, KY., where McPhee is quickly beguiled by the enormous UPS sorting facility. In a more intimate piece, he takes a canoe and retraces Thoreau's path along New England rivers, noting the modern urban sprawl as well as the wildlife. 'There are two places in the world-home and everywhere else,' the towboat captain tells McPhee, 'and everywhere else is the same.' But McPhee always uncovers the little differences that give every place its unique tale."Publishers Weekly
Review
"To read the studious John McPhee in this sensationalist age, when so many other literary journalists are shrieking from some self-aggrandizing edge, is to be reminded of what the genre should be--artfully reported stories that illuminate who we are."--Robert Braile, The Boston Globe
Synopsis
Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation.
Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the "tight-assed" Illinois River on a "towboat" pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being "a good deal longer than the
Titanic." And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff in 1839.
Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.
Synopsis
What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, at his adventurous best, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation.
Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot,
eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the tight-assed Illinois River on a
towboat pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being a good deal longer than the Titanic. And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John,
in a homemade skiff in 1839.
Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character. John McPhee is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of twenty-seven books and lives in Princeton, New Jersey. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year This is a book about people who drive trucks, captain ships, pilot towboats, drive coal trains, and carry lobsters through the air: people who work in freight transportation. In recent years, John McPhee has spent considerable time with such people, and Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them, of their work, and of his journeys in their company. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, five-axle, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats--in Ainsworth opinion the world's most beautiful truck, so highly polished you could part your hair while looking at it. He attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of fifteen thousand dollars a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes out in the sort among the machines that process a million packages a day at UPS Air's distribution hub at Louisville International Airport. He travels up the tight-assed Illinois River on a towboat pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being a good deal longer than the Titanic, longer even than the Queen Mary 2. In Nebraska, Kansas, Georgia, and the Power River Basin of Wyoming, he rides in the cabs of coal trains. And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by twenty-two-year-old Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff 164 years earlier, the journey described in Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Only in scale do the locks of the Middlesex and Union canals of nineteenth-century New England much differ from the locks of Midwestern rivers today. We often read about people in glamorous professions--surgeons, actors, musicians, writers--but so seldom about those who do the jobs we all depend on, those who transport raw materials on river barges, or haul the coal that generates electricity. If the human race survives another century or two, many of these jobs will vanish (they're already talking about running trains by remote control), and McPhee's work will provide an invaluable record of how those primitive people back in 2006, however heedless they were of what they were doing to their planet to their planet, treasured their bygone crafts . . . I hope he'll take us for rides on some more uncommon carriers at age] 85, perhaps a space station or a Mars rover or a submersible looking at what we've done to the ocean floor. These seem some of the few places he hasn't yet explored.--Adam Hochschild, The New York Book Review We often read about people in glamorous professions--surgeons, actors, musicians, writers--but so seldom about those who do the jobs we all depend on, those who transport raw materials on river barges, or haul the coal that generates electricity. If the human race survives another century or two, many of these jobs will vanish (they're already talking about running trains by remote control), and McPhee's work will provide an invaluable record of how those primitive people back in 2006, however heedless they were of what they were doing to their planet to their planet, treasured their bygone crafts . . . I hope he'll take us for rides on some more uncommon carriers at age] 85, perhaps a space station or a Mars rover or a submersible looking at what we've done to the ocean floor. These seem some of the few places he hasn't yet explored.--Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review The veteran New Yorker writer has done it again, delving into seemingly mundane topics--in this case, the various methods of moving freight--and emerging with indelible portraits of anonymous, everyday people.--Erik Spanberg, The Christian Science Monitor This book will keep you going much longer than eight hours]. It is Mr. McPhee at his wise, wry best, writing in top gear.--The Economist This is an] absorbing and deceptively simple book.--Jason Goodwin, The Washington Post Book World Once again McPhee] shows how a writer starting with the single most valuable tool in the box--curiosity--employs a whole array of techniques, and makes what interests him interesting to other people. That's so whether he's writing about barge traffic on the Illinois River or retracing Thoreau's famous journey on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. There's just nobody better at what he does.--Jean Bubail, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) Uncommon Carriers is an uncommonly fine bit of writing. New Yorker magazine writer John McPhee brings a discerning eye and succinct pen to his task. He transforms common carriers--trucks, trains, ships, barges and planes and everything--into unique vessels . . . Uncommon Carriers is perfect for the summer reader who prefers fact to fiction and who wants to learn some trivia . . . A delightful book.--Jules Wagman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch A fascinating book. . . . McPhee is a superb stylist, and his metaphors sing like truck tires.--Rob Kyff, Hartford Courant McPhee rides the rails, sits shotgun in a tanker truck and climbs aboard a river towboat as he investigates the ways in which the staples of modern life travel from one place to another. The seven chapters here, large portions of which have appeared in the New Yorker, for which the author is a staff writer, and the Atlantic Monthly, contain the trademark McPhee touches--unstinting attention to revealing details, a wry sense of humor and a way of rendering prosaic subjects fascinating. He really shines when he finds a character to match his interest in the mechanical, and truck driver Don Ainsworth, a central figure throughout two chapters, plays the perfect foil. As Ainsworth pilots his polished-chrome, 80,000-pounds-when-loaded chemical tanker truck across the country, McPhee reveals the driver's obsession with the Wall Street Journal, his collection of boots made from the skins of exotic animals such as water buffaloes and caimans and the technical skill it takes to steer his leviathan-sized vehicle clear of inattentive drivers and overeager cops ('four-wheelers' and 'bears, ' in the driver's lingo). Elsewhere, the author hitches a ride on a coal train a mile-and-a-half long, attends a school in France where tanker-ship captains practice tricky maneuvers on a pond in scale-sized model ships and rides along as a towboat pushes a thousand-foot-long line of barges up the Illinois River. McPhee portrays the main UPS sorting center in Louisville as an enormous Rube Goldberg contraption in which the workers inside, many of them college students slogging through night shifts to pay tuition, appear tiny in the shadow of the behemoth that roars all around them. In the one chapter that drags somewhat--perhaps because the central character is long-deceased--McPhee canoes the Concord and Merrimack Rivers along the route taken by Henry David Thoreau in 1839. Read this colorful journalism and you will never view an 18-wheeler, freight train or UPS truck in quite the same way.--Kirkus Reviews Famed for his geology epics, the popular McPhee here enters the world of heavy freight. Acutely attentive, he watches what an interstate truck driver, a railroad engineer, a towboat captain, and shipmasters do to conduct safely tens of thousands of tons of conveyance and cargo to their destinations. In spare, efficient prose, McPhee indicates, rather than directs readers toward, the skill and experience of the workers. They contend with a magnitude of inertia, and their maneuvers must anticipate peril ahead by miles. McPhee admiringly evokes the balletic performance on the gears and brakes by a truck driver, and on the throttles by a towboat captain as he negotiates the constrictions of the Illinois River; unfortunately, the shipmasters seem accident-prone, grounding and colliding their vessels. Their miscues are more educational than disastrous, thankfully, occurring far from sea near the French Alps, where a maritime school teaches ship handling with models on a pond. Hitching rides to describe how coal is moved, McPhee imparts a sense of the special sociology within each transportation mode, drawing from readers both enlightenment and respect.--Gilbert Taylor, Booklist McPhee sums up eight years of riding around with people who haul freight in vehicles ranging from 18-wheelers to towboats. --Library Journal McPhee's 28th book is a grown-up version of every young boy's fantasy life, as the peripatetic writer gets to ride in the passenger seat in an 18-whee
Synopsis
This is a book about people who drive trucks, captain ships, pilot towboats, drive coal trains, and carry lobsters through the air: people who work in freight transportation. John McPhee rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, five-axle, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats--in Ainsworth's opinion "the world's most beautiful truck," so highly polished you could part your hair while looking at it. He goes "out in the sort" among the machines that process a million packages a day at UPS Air's distribution hub at Louisville International Airport. And (among other trips) he travels up the "tight-assed" Illinois River on a towboat pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being "a good deal longer than the
Titanic," longer even than the
Queen Mary 2.
Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.
Synopsis
What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, at his adventurous best, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation.
Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot,
eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the "tight-assed" Illinois River on a
"towboat" pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being "a good deal longer than the Titanic." And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John,
in a homemade skiff in 1839.
Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.
About the Author
John McPhee is a staff writer at the New Yorker. He is the author of twenty-seven books. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.