Uncommon Carriers

Another excellent collection of short pieces from the master.

Great McPhee prose, but a bit lacking in treatment of subject. I get that McPhee seems to have had the time of his life joining these transportation engineers, but there was something missing for this reader.

C.W. McCall's Convoy, but make it literature.

This guy's specialty seems to be making subjects that might seem dry or boring into something intriguing. Transport, shadfish, geology.

Super interesting and engaging book.

Fascinating look at transportation. Learned so many things I never knew about.

There are two places in the world, home and everywere else,,and everywhere else is the same., 11 Jun 2006


There are two places in the world -- home and everywhere else, and everywhere else is the same.'

"The most beautiful truck on earth-Don Ainsworth's present sapphire-drawn convexing elongate stainless steel mirror- get s smidgen over six miles to the gallon. As its sole owner, he not only counts it calories with respect to it gross weight but with regard to the differing fuel structures of the states it traverses. It is much better to take Idaho fuel than phony-assed Oregon fuel. The Idaho fuel includes all the taxes. The Oregon fuel did not. Oregon feints with an attractive price at the pump, but then shoots an uppercut into the ton-mileage." In "Uncommon Carriers" we come to know Don Ainsworth, the intelligent, fastidious owner-driver of a meticulously kept 18-wheeler.

John McPhee rides from Atlanta to Washington state with Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, five-axle, and eighteen wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmets. John McPhee's writing carries us along in the seat with Don and John, and I have a new hero now, Don Ainsworth. A trucker worth his weight in gold and like Reader's Digest's old series, "a most unforgettable character". This book is "a grown-up version of every young boy's and girl's, I might add, fantasy life,"

This is John McPhee's 28th novel. What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation. Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. He attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for 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.

The most fascinating piece, McPhee visits the UPS hub at the Louisville, Kentucky, airport, where 5,000 workers sort a million packages every night. The building, with four million square feet of floor space and five miles of exterior walls, houses an almost entirely automated skein of conveyors where packages containing everything from Jockey shorts to live lobsters find their rightful destination in minutes--a sort of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory for the world of mail-order commerce.

John McPhee and his son-in-law spend five days in a canoe, retracing the route Henry David Thoreau wrote about in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Though there is no freight involved, it is an engaging essay nonetheless, as the canoeists encounter a terrain much changed since the 19th century. This piece was a
Disappointment. It is well written, but not up to his par, in my opinion.

John McPhee ends his book y revisiting with Don Ainsworth thirty-six months after he had first left him. As He says, "If you have crossed the American continent in the world's most beautiful truck, you prefer not to leave it forever". Yes, suh, BK, this is the best of McPhee's books about people and this is the best there is. Highly recommended. prisrob 6-10-06

Six tales of life on the fringes, yet also at the center.

McPhee on the awe-inspiring scale of the logistics businesses at the core of modern American capitalism: trucks, trains, barges, and UPS. Delicious.