Another book that was a simple and low cost download from Barnes & Noble to my Nook.

As usual with John McPhee, an interesting set of essays regarding travel and shipping. He has a unique way of making what might be mundane and every day activities into something fresh and vivid.

I don't recall ever reading a McPhee piece that did not hold an interest for me. In this book, I would recommend the canoe trip and the piece on the coal train as the best, with the ride with trucker Don Ainsworth a close second.

Generally, I'm not interested in coal trains, canoeing from Massachusetts to NH, or hauling WD40, among other things, but everything is magical in both the details and the language when it's filtered through John McPhee.
I enjoyed it even more than Founding Fish, and I loved that book. If you like language, the sound of words, descriptions that make you smile with joy, I think this book is for you.

Another McPhee winner, as he takes you aboard 18-wheelers, canal ferries and other thrillrides you may not have experienced. His writing is focused and to the point, provides history and background as well as a very personal view of the author's hands-on (being there!) experience. Read it and watch the mondo trucks rumbling by and then consider what it might be like downshifting as you negotiate your 80,000 lb load swishing about in the big metal cylinder a few feet behind you.
And learn what it costs to wash out it's insides when your load is delivered.
In other hands this could be discordant but in McPhee's, it's heart-stopping adventure and well-told reporting with lessons about that with which we should all be familiar.

DNF
I couldn't finish this book. It's not a bad book. My problem with is a combination of me not being in the right reading mood for this type of book, and the author not touching upon the sort of insights I look for in a book like this.

Each "job" story (I completed the first two) focused on describing the work itself, the general lifestyle the job creates for people who work it, and a mini-dive into one or more specific people doing that job. To accomplish this, the author rode along with people while they performed these jobs, apparently for days and weeks at a time.

I found the surface biographies of each worker to be insufficient and unsatisfying. The descriptions of the jobs went too deep when I didn't care, and barely touched aspects that interested me. Again, this is probably more about what I wanted in the book not matching what the book is, and not really a failing of the book.

In the end, I'm not the right reader for this book. I'm cutting this one loose.

John McPhee writes so well, so perfectly, really, I'm sorry to say I didn't finish a couple of chapters that were about boats. The 18-wheeler chapters and the railroad chapter made me want to do exactly the same rides. The truck driver, the .engineers, and other rail people had such interesting jobs. Makes you think about them when you're driving on the freeway or train-watching.

John McPhee is known for his "creative nonfiction" works. This is my first McPhee work to read, and I must say I enjoyed it immensely. He rides across America in an 80,000-lb tanker 18-wheeler. He crisscrosses the Midwest on coal trains coming out of Nebraska. He visits a scale model ship handling training lake in the French Alps. He explores the humongous UPS hub at the Louisville airport. He retraces the canoe trip of Thoreau and his brother up the Merrimack River (okay, that last chapter was really boring--but the rest were great).

As someone who enjoys travel, solitude, and administrative logistics, this book was right down my alley. I doubt I will be trading in my keyboard for a big rig anytime soon, but it's nice to know the option's out there . . .

How does "stuff" get to us? Master writer John McPhee details that in this exquisite book about the various "carriers" (deep ocean ships; 18 wheelers; coal trains; river barges) that transport the goods that we use each and every day.
Even if you don't think you'd be interested in the topic, McPhee's writing will sweep you up ... and hoping for more.

An outstanding collection of articles about men in the drivers' seat and captain's chairs -- and how they learn to fill that chair. It's a study of professionals.

eBook. Vivid descriptions of shipping, somewhat at the extremes (hazardous materials trucking, Illinois river barges, live lobsters via UPS, coal trains) that give a sense of what is being moved to create our modern way of life.

Poorly written but the lobster chapter was good.

This book was fine.

The author gives us the background on various transport occupations. Great non fiction can leave you feeling as if you could really empathize with a doer of that job. You can feel what it’s like to be them, imagine how they spend their leisure time, what they think of their neighbors. Or great nonfiction can leave you with some deep understanding of how an aspect of society operates by internal rules that are completely unintelligible to your years on this planet. And you can walk away newly alive to the complexity and beauty of this place.

This book never quite achieves either. It approaches something great once, describing Don Aimsworths life as a long range trucker. You approach an understanding of why someone would choose to spend their life driving around the country. At least for this particular individual. There’s a sort of freedom that Don achieves in his solitude. And the more you know Don, the less you can imagine him without that freedom.

Butt otherwise the book falls into descriptions that veer off into tangents sorta like if you had to read a Wikipedia article and click every hyperlinked word along the way.

I don’t regret reading it and thought the chapters on UPS/lobsters and the one on inland barges were interesting enough.

I found it kind of annoying to read, at times. The author wields analogies like a cudgel. They don’t much help you better understand the concept or image being conveyed, but they do remind you that the author knows a lot of obscure things. Here’s an example: “if you were left alone there you would need a compass no less than if you were dropped into the Gabon between Makokou and Mekambo.” The author is deceiving a UPS sortation center that is large.
The point of this analogy seems to be that it’s hard to navigate this particular sortation center.

It’s a fine skim.

Three stars

McPhee rides on different "carriers." Did not enjoy the stories as much as I hoped I would have by such a fine author.

One of my favorite episodes: The truckers all stare at him, so he buys a cap with a gold visor, an American flag, and so on. Now he fits right in.

Nice science fact worth remembering: Bernoulli's Principle--where the flow is fastest, pressure is lowest--holds airplanes in the sky.

He shows how lobsters are shipped around the world. Lobsters are to Christmas dinners in France what turkeys are in America. Shipping live lobsters around the world is just animal cruelty in my view.

At a public hearing, Wyoming officials outline how they plan to sterilize coyotes. One rancher says, "We don't want to fuck the coyotes, we want to get rid of them." There is an underlying failure of getting along with nature throughout the book.

T-shirt on a fisherman: "UNION FISH STRIKE MORE."

Dick Eisfeller of Greenland NH films trains for a living. He will film for 24 hours straight without sleeping at times.