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.

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee is a collection of transportation pieces. McPhee has engaged in participatory journalism by embedding himself in different situations. The first chapter is titled “A Fleet of One.” McPhee hits the road with Don Ainsworth in his sixty-five foot chemical tanker. They travel from the Carolinas to Oregon, then to San Diego and then back east to Tennessee. The trucker’s lifestyle is interesting and Ainsworth’s stories remind us not to believe all the common stereotypes about truckers.
The second chapter is “The Ships of Port Revel “ and is about the Port Revel Shiphandling Training Centre in Saint-Pierre-de-Bressieux, France. The Center is a maritime pilotage school that trains pilots, masters, and officers on large ships like supertankers, container ships, LNG carriers and cruise ships. The facility uses manned models at a 1:25 scale on a man-made lake designed to simulate natural conditions including harbors, canals, and open seas. It was the first such facility in the world. The Centre was created in 1967 by Laboratoire Dauphinois d'Hydraulique.
The third chapter is “Tight-Assed River. “ It is about barges on the Illinois River. This is a tale of scale, really, really big barges (105 feet wide and almost 1,000 feet long) in really, really tight spots. There is a great deal of danger and the accompanying suspense involved in the precise and ballet-like manipulations carried out by the deck crew. Like truckers, bargemen can’t be put into a button-down, nine-to-five box. They come from a variety of backgrounds, cover a spectrum of personalities and do the work for many different reasons.
“Five Days on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” is the title of the fourth chapter. Unlike the first three it is not a contemporary transportation story. Rather, it is the re-enactment of a journey from the pages of history inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s first published work “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.” Thoreau tells the story of a trip made by him and his brother John from Concord, Massachusetts, to Hooksett, New Hampshire in 1839. McPhee re-enacts the trip with his friend Dick Kazmaier and his son-in-law Mark Svenvold. I enjoyed using Google Maps to follow along for part of the trip. It was interesting to note that many of the landmarks, creeks, bridges and promontories are just as described.
The fifth chapter “Out in the Sort” begins at Clearwater Seafood in Arichat, Nova Scotia, temporary home to a million hibernating lobsters. From Arichat the lobsters are shipped to all parts of the world. But first they go to Worldport, the UPS hub and Air Service Center in Louisville, Kentucky. Lobsters are just the opening example of what passes through the center. With its own US Customs Station for international shipments the center screens, scans and sorts everything imaginable of all sizes, weights and shapes. The mammoth building is a maze of escalators and horizontal belts that speed packages to dozens of waiting cargo planes.
“Coal Train” is the sixth chapter. It is a story of power and scale in which trains move mountains of coal from the world’s largest coal deposit at Black Thunder Mine in Wyoming. A train might be a mile and three-quarters long hauling twenty-three thousand tons of coal. There are two diesel/electric engines in the front and three at the rear. The diesels generate electricity to power the engines that actually do the pulling and pushing. There is a delicate ballet of movement and timing performed by dispatchers, trainmen, brakemen and engineers. The destination might be almost anywhere in the country where there are coal-fired plants, but for McPhee’s tale the end point is Plant Scherer. Owned by Georgia Power, at twelve thousand acres it is the largest coal-fired power plant in the Northern Hemisphere. It processes 12 million tons of coal a year from 1300 trains made up from 2,000 miles of cars.
The final chapter ofUncommon Carriers is “The Fleet of One II.” It is a return to Don Ainsworth’s tanker and serves as an epilogue to a very interesting book.

Like all McPhee, a very well written book about carrying freight. Yeah, I know. Exciting. But fascinating and human. We learn of trucking and coal trains and river barges. The only section that didn't fit was McPhee recreating Thoreau's Massachusetts canoe trip. It didn't feel like it should have been there. Still well written, just a little off compared to the rest.

It's a mixed bag. He makes fascinating the mundane, but sometimes lingers too long there and it starts to circle back around. Still enjoyable. 3.5/5

As someone who is interested in logistics, largely from my own personal experience, I found this book to be deeply interesting.  The author clearly has some personal interest in logistics as well, and knowing a bit about the back story of this book as I do, I found a few aspects of the book to be highly interesting.  For one, the author keeps a fair amount close to the vest, such as the difficulty he had in actually persuading companies that it would be a good idea to let a journalist/writer like himself on the boats to talk to the people who worked in logistics.  If you look at the book, you don't get a sense of the deliberate design of his structure, or of the work it took in setting up the trips, or even the timing of the particular trips (except that there are two trips with the enjoyable truck driver who bookends the story, and it is clear which one is first and which is a follow-up trip).  The amount of time it took to work on the project is unknown, and the work even manages to jump back in time and reflect on earlier writings about some of the places where the author went, all of which makes for a typically enjoyable McPhee experience.

This book consists of seven chapters that are connected essays dealing with the subject of logistics, all of them told in an earthy and humorous manner by noted writer John McPhee.  The first of the essays tells of a trip that McPhee took from northern Georgia to Washington with a truck driver, where he learns about the economics and culture of truck driving, and enjoys the way that truck drivers operate, where they eat and sleep, how much they obey the rules, and so on.  After that comes a visit to Port Revel, where various people from all over the world learn how to better manage ships and become better pilots.  This leads to an essay on barges who travel up and down the Illinois river dealing with the riparian logistics of the greater Mississippi basin, and how much work it is to manage such a task successfully.  The author spends some time following the trail of the Thoreau brothers down the Concord and Merrimack rivers and examines how much has changed today from the mid 19th century.  McPhee spends some time in the sort looking at deskilling and the way that UPS has sought to profit from being a logistics company of many talents and abilities, something I have some experience with.  He also goes to a coal train and sees how Wyoming coal is brought to power plants around the USA before closing with a return trip with the opening trucker, where he compares truck driving in the East and in the West.

Overall, there is a great deal to appreciate about this particular book.  The author shows himself interested in logistics in a broad perspective and has enough sensitivity to sympathetically portray the various people he discusses.  Whether he is dealing with single men driving trucks, or married men (and women) working on boats, or single women sorting packages for UPS, McPhee is a sympathetic viewer and listener of their daily lives and someone who is able to convey the truths of their working lives and how it affects their personal lives and how and why they work in logistics in very relatable ways.  That general good nature allows these essays to shine and gives the reader a better understanding of the sort of people on whom we depend for so much that we use in our lives, most of which is brought to us through supply chains and carried in boats and on trucks and trains by logistics workers who in many ways are people not unlike ourselves.  And for those of us who have personal experience in dealing with logistics, it is comforting to have these sketches of life on the rivers and seas and roads and railroads of the world where so many goods are carried for us and for our neighbors.