This is another highly enjoyable McPhee book. I was able to learn a lot about several different freight movements. Plus, in the middle of the book, McPhee presents a nice interlude of a trip he took on the Concord River, following a similar route taken by the Thoreau brothers.

McPhee can sure write! And he turns the ordinary into a fascinating read. Really enjoyed this.

McPhee = The Master

I enjoyed three of the chapters especially: one about a miniature replica in Switzerland of ocean shipping to allow captains to practice maneuvers; another about cross-country trucking; and a third about barge shipping on major American rivers. This is all new information to me, and I like the way John McPhee takes his inexpert eyes and mind into the experience and tells the story to an audience of inexperts. He's pretty funny, too.

Such an old man book

Essays on a truck driver, a training school for large ship handling, a towboat on the Illinois River, the UPS sorting facility, and a coal train, all made entertaining by McPhee's writing style which collects essentials and minutiae. The UPS chapter, however, was rather disjoint. Another chapter, on a canoe trip following the path of Thoreau, did not hold my interest.

I’ve been looking forward to reading John McPhee for a while now, but I found this underwhelming mostly. I will try another one of his books.

3.5 stars - a collection of John McPhee's journalism from The New Yorker, all involving the world of transportation (long-haul truckers, coal trains, cargo ships, et al), which may sound boring, but - have you read McPhee?

The long-haul trucker pieces that open and close the collection are standouts; the coal train is fascinating, even at 50 pages. Other pieces, which appeared in the magazine in much condensed form should likely have remained condensed. But even an overlong McPhee is a masterclass in narrative nonfiction. This is a book that looks at the mundane world and finds it riveting.

DNF

On CD, this book consists of eight discs, and at the start of the eighth disc the foul language suddenly took a quantum leap, so I stopped listening. Was the author accurately quoting his sources? No doubt. Are there other ways to tell the story without actually quoting the profanity? Of course. Most authors did so routinely until, oh, the past 20 or 30 years or so. I realize there are those who think writing is somehow better or more honest because the actual, repulsive language is used. I quite disagree. If you use foul language on a Duluth Transit Authority bus, the driver will immediately inform you that you must stop using this language or you will have to leave the bus. I think this is a good rule. It applies to my car. It applies to CDs I listen to on my car. The common use of coarse language in our society has not improved society in any way, it has just made it ... coarse.
The first seven discs had some interesting material. They contained the amount of coarse language that I have somehow come to find acceptable, or at least tolerable.

Beautifully crafted vignettes of America’s transport system — its characters, its logistics, and its colour.

John McPhee knows how to make the mundane interesting. This book is all about how good are moved by different methods. Of course, he goes on journeys. He rides with a trucker, a train engineer, a canoist in an old canal route, etc. I found myself thinking differently about how things go from place to place. Thank you to John McPhee.