Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48345 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-03
• Released on: 2007-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. McPhee's 28th book (after The Founding Fish) is a grown-up version of every young boy's fantasy life, as the peripatetic writer gets to ride in the passenger seat in an 18-wheel truck, tag along on a barge ride up the Illinois River and climb into the cabin of a Union Pacific coal train that's over a mile long. He even gets to be the one-man crew on a 20-ton scale model of an ocean tanker in a French pond where ship pilots go for advanced training. As always, McPhee's eye for idiosyncratic detail keeps the stories (some of which have appeared in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly) lively and frequently moves them in interesting directions. One chapter that starts out in a Nova Scotia lobster farm winds up in Louisville, Ky., where McPhee is quickly beguiled by the enormous UPS sorting facility. In a more intimate piece, he takes a canoe and retraces Thoreau's path along New England rivers, noting the modern urban sprawl as well as the wildlife. "There are two places in the world—home and everywhere else," the towboat captain tells McPhee, "and everywhere else is the same." But McPhee always uncovers the little differences that give every place its unique tale. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–McPhee charms readers with an insiders look at various forms of freight carriers, including trucks, trains, and ocean tankers. He describes his personal experiences of traveling with a handful of people who transport bulk cargo. A self-proclaimed four wheeler with a tendency to ignore stop signs, he identifies the exceptional talents and quirky personality of each driver, seaman, and conductor and wonders at the expertise of these unknown mavens. The captain of the SS Stella Lykes can parallel park a 700-foot ship in a 750-foot space without assistance. Pilot Mel Adams maneuvers a fully loaded tugboat four times longer than the river is wide, with as little as 10 feet of clearance where the river turns. Dan Ainsworth, chemical tanker driver, factors the weight of his fuel, the distance between truck stops, and the weight of his load to avoid exceeding the limit at weigh stations. A pleasure to read, each of the seven chapters is an adventure waiting to be taken individually or collectively. Students will learn of the danger, the technology, and the precision required to bring coal to heat peoples houses, goods to their grocery stores, and imports to their harbors.–Brigeen Radoicich, Fresno County Office of Education, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Over the past few years John McPhee, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has traveled the United States by rail and road, by river and canal. Riding shotgun in Don Ainsworth's 65-foot chemical tanker, he "fell down" Cabbage Hill in Oregon -- a 2,000-foot descent over 10 miles. Towboat pilot Mel Adams took him through the Pekin wiggles on the Illinois River with five feet of clearance below the bridge. Travis Spalding, who works for UPS, guided him around a white box between the runways at Louisville International Airport containing 4 million square feet of floor space and maybe 50,000 pounds of torpid lobsters, and he also went up a line of Nebraskan railroad towns to Gibbon Junction over the Platte River, with Paul Fitzpatrick as conductor.

Uncommon Carriers is about the truckers, dispatchers, towboat crews, train drivers and trainee sea-captains whose lives revolve around shifting freight. There's a scene in the book in which a boatman goes up to the end of a towboat on the Illinois river. Halfway down he looks tiny; by the time he's reached the bow, he's an ant. The tow, pushing seven barges wired together, is much longer than the Titanic; it burns 2,400 gallons of diesel fuel a day. It is a distant relative of the mining trucks McPhee sees in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, where the coal is sawed out of the ground to make canyons several miles long, and hauled to the coal trains by vehicles so large, he writes, that their tires look "the way bagels would look to a virus." Some of this coal goes 1,800 miles to Georgia's Plant Scherer, the largest coal-fired power plant in the western hemisphere. If it burns more coal in summer than winter -- that's for air-conditioning.

This is also a book about people dwarfed by their surroundings -- by the systems they operate, the machinery they drive, the distances they cover. Dwarfed -- but not necessarily diminished. Ainsworth, for instance, owns his own rig: a dark sapphire tractor and a chemical tanker so shiny and mirror-bright that you could part your hair in it. He reads the Wall Street Journal, collects boots and is something of a philosopher. When he has the exterior of his rig washed, he goes to places that use "either reverse-osmosis or deionized rinse water"; it costs him double, but there are no streaks on the finish. "This," he says, "is as close as a man will ever know what it feels like to be a really gorgeous woman." After he washes the interior of his tanker, he's free to pick up another load of hazmats. They are chemicals such as WD-40 concentrate, parts degreaser, surfactant, a soap used in making bricks, weed killers, paint thinners, latex for plywood, latex for the dye that turns brown cardboard white -- things you never knew existed. He won't carry cashew-nutshell oil, which goes into anything that requires friction, such as brake pads. "I believe it harms my barrel," he says. Ainsworth is a very, very good driver.

Like Ainsworth -- indeed, like most of the experts he encounters -- McPhee is also very good at what he does. He has written about geology in the past, and he deals with this stratum of American civilization in a deceptively neutral tone, as if he were describing tectonic plates: His prose has a tendency to stack up and roll on by like a two-mile boxcar railroad engine passing an impatient four-wheeler at a crossing.

What fascinates McPhee, apart from the lives of the men and women he meets, is their oddly coded language. He likes that hard-crust jargon, with its acronyms and labels, not least, I think, because it reflects the dignified efforts of men and women to encompass and express facets of an alien world much larger than ourselves. Very gently, and without any superfluous comment, McPhee portrays ours as a Rabelaisian economy, a web of bloated, fundamentally brainless systems ingeniously devised to serve the world's appetites. One moment it's coal; the next, it's those lobsters I mentioned, who are kept alive at a steady temperature to prevent them from wanting to molt and are sold all year round, all over the world, via the UPS hub in Kentucky -- a hub maintained by drowsy students who work nights to pay for college.

McPhee's uncommon carriers are, in their way, witness to the wilderness that is America, even to this day. In this absorbing and deceptively simple book, he goes back to Thoreau, paddling his way up a river that has already been worked over and abandoned by economic man; but I found myself thinking about the Lewis and Clark expedition and the moment when America was still a vast unknown. What has become of this humongous space? What's in it? Not mammoths, as Jefferson might have guessed. Just torpid lobsters, sleepy people.

Reviewed by Jason Goodwin
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Another uncommonly good book from McPhee
Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote that "to do common things perfectly is far better worth our endeavor than to do uncommon things respectably." The focus of John McPhee's excellent new book, Uncommon Carriers, is on people who do uncommon things remarkably well.

On my first, nervous day in the ocean shipping industry (an industry that carries most of the world's cargo in international trade) my boss took me to a run down diner in lower Manhattan. We sat at the counter and the waiter came up to us with a fish in his hand. "You have to have the fish. Look at this. The boss picked it out at the market this morning. You have to have this." After he walked away my boss told me that in our business I was going to be entrusted with other people's cargo. He said that as long as I treated that cargo, and my job, like that waiter treated that fish, I'd eventually learn how to do my job the right way. I could have quit then and there because I've probably never had a better lesson about how to do a job right than I got at that lunch. "Uncommon Carriers" is about a group of people who transport other people's cargo as if it were "their fish". It is a fascinating look at the people and methods by which we get food on our tables, heat in our furnaces and clothes on our back.

I've admired McPhee since I read his wonderful overview of life in the liner shipping industry, "Looking for a Ship". He has a way of taking complicated processes or procedures that are little known to the general public and writing about them in a way that the general public, and even I, can understand. When it comes to describing the people who operate these machines, McPhee doesn't get in the way of the voice of his protagonists. He lets their natural eloquence come through.

Uncommon Carriers begins and ends with a look at Don Ainsworth and his sixty-five foot, five-axle chemical tanker truck that carries all sorts of hazardous chemicals throughout the United States. Ainsworth treats his rig with the pride and concern a parent treats his or her first child. He makes sure it is immaculate and only uses filtered water to clean it. He prides himself on being able to navigate the steepest descents without resort to his brakes. Rather, like a chess player he plans his downshifting (over 18 gears) in such a way as to keep the rig at an appropriately safe speed. Next we travel to Grenoble, France where masters of huge containerships or tankers spend a week in an advanced simulation exercise using large models of their vessels that sharpen their skills as they navigate the world's oceans. As with Ainsworth, McPhee provides us with the voices of these international seamen as they dissect their performance. McPhee goes on to include chapters on a tug and barge-master moving a tremendous amount of tonnage on the narrow confines of the Illinois River; a walk through the enormous air cargo sorting facility at UPS's facility at the airport in Louisville, Kentucky. It is here that McPhee quotes one of the operators of these horribly complicated sorting processes thusly: "We become a partner with the companies. We run these businesses like they're our own." Once again, here are living examples of the lesson my first boss tried to teach me in that little diner. Finally, we get a look at the country's coal trains, moving millions of tons of coal a year on mile long freight trains from coal mines in Wyoming to energy facilities around the country.

The only chapter that didn't quite work for me was McPhee's discussion of his 5-days canoeing up the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, following the footsteps of John and Henry Thoreau. Although well-written and evocative of a time long past this chapter just didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the book. Nevertheless, the clarity of McPhee's writing is well worth the minor diversion.

Fans of McPhee won't need me to convince them to read "Uncommon Carriers". For those new to McPhee all of his books are worthy of reading (and in many cases re-reading). After reading Uncommon Carriers you won't look at a truck, train, or tank vessel without thinking about those people who treat these huge vessels and the cargo they carry as if they were their own. Highly recommended.

L. Fleisig

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. And, we are privy to all of his first hand knowledge about trucking and life in general.

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. 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. We learn that some tank wash facilities, where the containers of food-transporting trucks are flushed out between hauls, have a rabbi standing by to assure they are kosher. It is bad luck to utter the word lapin (rabbit) on a French ship. There is a subculture of more than 100,000 "train watchers" in this country, and there are more transients hopping illegal rides on freight trains today than there were during the 1930s.

In 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, 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 by 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, sweetie, this is the best of McPhee's books about people and this is the best there is. Highly recommended.
prisrob 6-11-06

Uncommonly Good Writing
John McPhee is a national treasure. Through 28 books, he has brought participatory journalism to high art, bringing us stories of interesting people doing interesting things. This time, he takes a series of essays first published in New Yorker magazine, all addressing aspects of transportation of cargo, and presents them in "Uncommon Carriers."

McPhee includes stories on trucking hazardous material, barging on the Illinois River, a school for oil tanker captains and the coals trains carrying coal from Wyoming the southeastern coal-fired power plants. As always, McPhee makes it fascinating. Partly, it's because he finds such fascinating characters. Trucker Don Ainsworth, for example. Partly, it's because he finds such fascinating tidbits. Rabbis who assure kosher truck transport, for example. But mostly it's because he finds and tells of fascinating subjects. Ranging from 1.3 mile long coal trains to 1,100 foot long strings of barges pushed up the narrow Illinois River, you have to ask how he finds out about this stuff.

Would-be writers could do worse then study a McPhee paragraph, or analyze the organization of subjects across an essay. McPhee's skills include the ability to make it all seem effortless. When you consider the welter of detail he brings to each subject, without ever overwhelming the reader, your respect for his skills will grow. And I admit to a certain envy about how much fun McPhee gets to have.

The book includes a tangentially related essay; McPhee and his son-in-law retrace the path of Henry David Thoreau and his brother in 1839 up an abandoned commercial waterway. The abandoned locks and channels of the canal system on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers speak to another time and another definition of commerce. The contrast between McPhee's writing and Thoreau's couldn't be stronger. "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" is nearly unreadable; McPhee's writing is impeccable.

Another outstanding collection of essays from America's greatest living expository writer. Highly recommended.