Uncommon Carriers

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. John McPhee is a staff writer at "The New Yorker." He is the author of twenty-nine books, all published by FSG. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. 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. "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 . . . 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."--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, 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" "Thanks to McPhee's elegant prose and his close observation, we learn a great deal about the machines. The author takes almost boyish pleasure in describing how to actually operate a towboat, or a mile-long coal train, and it is the pilots, engineers, and skippers he encounters who are the true 'uncommon carriers' of his title."--Witold Rybczynski, "The New York Review of Books" ""Uncommon Carriers" is about the truckers, dispatchers, towboat crews, train drivers and trainee sea-captains whose lives revolve around shifting freight . . . This is also a book about people dwarfed by their surroundings--by the systems they operate, the machinery they drive, the distances they cover. Dwarfed--but not necessarily diminished . . . What fascinates McPhee, apart from the lives of the men and women he meets, is their oddly coded language. He likes that hard-crust jargon, with its acronyms and labels, not least, I think, because it reflects the dignified efforts of men and women to encompass and express facets of an alien world much larger than ourselves. Very gently, and without any superfluous comment, McPhee portrays ours as a Rabelaisian economy, a web of bloated, fundamentally brainless systems ingeniously devised to serve the world's appetites . . . L]ike most of the experts he encounters . . . McPhee is also very good at what he does. He has written about geology in the past, and he deals with this stratum of American civilization in a deceptively neutral tone, as if he were describing tectonic plates: His prose has a tendency to stack up and roll on by like a two-mile boxcar railroad engine passing an impatient four-wheeler at a crossing . . . McPhee's uncommon carriers are, in their way, witness to the wilderness that is America, even to this day. In this absorbing and deceptively simple book, he goes back to Thoreau, paddling his way up a river that has already been worked over and abandoned by economic man."--Jason Goodwin, "The Washi