I think I prefer his writing in book form rather than essay—the fleet of one pieces are excellent.

My first foray into McPhee. Compulsively readable, entertaining and informative. Precisely about the mundane things that fascinate me, but man, this guy loves to talk about how hot he thinks the women he encounters on his travels are.

John McPhee has an eye for the unusual and commonplace. A book about the means of passage. How does “stuff” get from one place to another. Planes, trains, trucks, boats and such. As with all of McPhee’s writing, it is also about the people steering and driving the various modes of transport. This audiobook was narrated by the author, a treat

A great peak into various transporters, but unfortunately capturing the minutae of their work ends up with some boring and jargon-filled passages, with only trucker lingo having the snap to break. McPhee including a chapter about a kayaking trip a friend and him took mirroring Thoreau feels like it barely belongs here (AND IT'S SO BORING). Thankfully, it's followed by the best chapter in the book, which explores a UPS packaging distribution center and explores corporate benevolence and modern life in a way that comments on The Way We Live without ever being hamfisted.

It seemed like a quirky subject for a book but I thought I'd try it. Author John McPhee reports on his travels in the USA on various modes of transportation. He finds himself in an eighteen-wheel chemical tanker with hazmat materials inside, a towboat pushing a triple load of barges up the Illinois River and in the cabs of 150-car long coal trains traversing Nebraska and Wyoming. He also spends time inside a major hub for UPS with four million square feet of floor space at the Louisville Airport located between parallel runways just to see how zillions of packages are correctly routed into trucks and planes. Oh, and he follows the path of Henry David Thoreau & his brother John down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in a sixteen-foot canoe. The craziest "trip" was at a lake in French Alps where--for $15,000 per week--captains of huge ocean going liners "practice" with twenty-foot scale models for any eventuality that might occur on the high seas.

In the course of these travels, the author weaves a lot of local history into his travels along with a great deal of humor and insight. This book is a fascinating ride (pun intended) into worlds that the average American never visits.

A major letdown after Coming into the Country, the only other McPhee book I've read, and one of my all-time favorites...

gator - strip of tire
r.o. rinse - reverse-osmosis (truck) wash
teetotaller - doesn’t drink
paucity - only in small or insufficient quantities; scarcity ~ “paucity of information"
NCIC - National Crime Information Center ~ system within the FBI
cavitate - formation of empty space within a solid ~ Every ship has a window of cavitation.
Williamson turn - good way to stop ~ turn the wheel hard until the ship is 60 degrees off the course it was on. Then shift the wheel to the other extreme. The ship circles and returns to the place where it left the original track.
wharf - quayside mooring (loop rope) able area ~ “In such a ship you never use the wharf as a brake.”
blouse, slacks, blazer
peripatetic - traveling from place to place
catechism - summary of the principles of Christian religion in the form of questions and answers
Bernoulli’s principle - where the flow is fastest, the pressure is lowest ~ also lowers pressure at the stern of a ship
synch - sync ~ “Rick and Tom are not out of synch.”
flanking ~ downstream move (of a ship)
anoxic - water depleted of dissolved oxygen
deadhead - pilots or crew who go back as passengers while on duty ~ “deadhead leg home”
antiquation - make obsolete, old-fashioned or out of date

clear lobster blood
black-hole mathematician



quotes/ideas to ponder
P 17 ‘If it’s rainy and your car won’t start, rip off the distributor cap and spray WD-40 in there. The WD means water displacement.’

23 In general, fuel is cheaper on or below I-40, and north of I-40 it’s costly.

24 paid himself were $1.08 times the odometer

25 Truck drivers make $70k/yr if they’re Teamsters, but few are. Specialists like auto-haulers can make $100k/yr. An owner-operator may gross a $100k, but roughly half is overhead: tractor payments, road taxes, insurance, maintenance, and about $20k worth of fuel.

34 ‘The architecture of the tank says what is in it.’ [...]

37 ‘Sometimes you do this by Zen.’ He had never been to driver school. ‘I’m a farm boy,’ he explained. ‘I know how to shift.’ There are two things you need to know: how to shift, and how to align yourself and maintain lane control--exactly how much space is on each side.

40 5000 gallon tanks, but big 18 wheelers can have 9000 gallons

53 double the current speed [of the ship], you square the force on the ship

75 ‘Every day is a holiday, every meal a banquet. Got it made. Just don’t know it.’

81 Cherokee ~ see it in high cheekbones

81 Good-looking woman, the men are like buzzards on a fence.

92 & 101 History of Lake Michigan and engineers reversed the Chicago river

111 lure colors: ‘In clear water, use blue-and-chrome, black-and-chrome, black-and-gold, and anything that looks like a threadfin shad. In stained water, chartreuse.’

134 Thoreau’s structure would almost be pure free association [...] A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is 90 percent digression and ten percent narrative [...]

139 a horse, just walking around, can carry roughly 250 lbs

169 The root criterion impelling UPS and FedEx appears to be that a healthy business grows, expands, and must go on indefinitely expanding, or it dies.

225 find a happy medium between caring too much and too little

Divided into six sections based on the mode of "carrier" McPhee is traveling with: HAZMAT truck drivers, Ocean-going cargo ships, Mississippi river barges, Canals of the northeast, UPS/FedEx and deliveries, Freight trains.

Most scientifically fascinating was the cargo ship piece where McPhee attends training school for the captains and skippers of these massive vessels. On a lake in Switzerland, they train using life-size-yet-scaled models. One trainee is practicing a docking maneuver and parks an impressive 6 inches from the pier. The teacher reminds him that at full scale, he's something like 15 yards away. If the birds on the shore of the lake were at full scale, they would be 6 feet tall.
The canal chapter is a total waste- McPhee and a friend follow Thoreau's canoe trip up the Hudson to some spot in Mass. Yawn.
My favorite of course was the truck driving chapter. Not only is it charming and interesting, it spoke to a deep longing to be a truck driver myself. In his epilogue, McPhee revisits truckers saying that "the late-night hum at hundreds of truck stops across America is a quintessential piece of our sonic landscape." Indeed.

Unfortunately this was a book-on-mp3, and McPhee is no voice actor. I was actually stunned to hear a director listed in the "credits," since I had sort of assumed McPhee just decided to settle in with a cup of tea one afternoon and read his whole book quietly to himself. Recommend to anyone interested in quirky engineering and/or is consumed by a burning desire to drive a big piece of machinery.

John McPhee's study of transportation modes. John rides along with truckers, trainmen, and riverboat captains to see how they do their thing. Very detailed. I especially enjoyed the truckers and the descriptions of trucks on the highway.

I didn't actually read the book, but I assume that I read most, if not all of its contents as articles in The New Yorker. I definitely remember reading about the trucker, the coal trains and the river barges.

This book is a collection of mini-biographies of people in the transportation industry. The first, last, and by far most compelling tells the story of a long-haul trucker -- a driver that owns his own rig and tank, transporting various goods. There's something deeply satisfying about seeing a real expert at work: someone that not only knows how to do their job well, but truly and deeply knows how to handle any eventuality effortlessly. The truck driver in this book is unquestionably an expert of that variety.

Unfortunately, the other stories aren't quite as interesting. A few of them are interesting enough -- although not up to the standard of the first one -- but the rest are sub-par. One is about Thoreau's travels with his brother, that the author replicates -- somewhat. It seems out of place, compared to the rest of the pieces, and it's not even that enjoyable to read. There's another piece on UPS, which should have been a highlight (goodness knows that there is a huge untapped mine of stories there) but was only so-so: some parts of that one are enjoyable to read, but those parts are more about UPS's anonymous subcontracting of, well, almost anything (laptop repair, order fulfillment, etc), and not about transportation.

In the end, I really enjoyed this book. I just wish the author would have dropped about half of it, and either expanded the rest or found other high-quality segments to replace it.

I don't know why I read this book. I don't know why I even own this book, someone must have left it at my house. These subject matter was incredibly boring to me but the book itself was well written and full of information. My only problem was the random side tangents John McPhee would go on, describing details of pointless things (or at the end describing every single truck journey!).
I'm going to look at his other books to see if any might interest me, but I think for the most part I'll be staying away.