Uncommon Carriers, by John McPhee

MadArchitect · Posted: Sun Jun 18, 2006 7:25 pm Post subject: Uncommon Carriers, by John McPhee

I'll post this in the suggestion thread for next quarter, when it's made, but I wanted to go ahead and throw this one out there for consideration. Honestly, I don't expect it to attract much attention, but McPhee is a great journalist, and I think it would be worthwhile for every one here to try a sample of his work. He's one of my favorite writers, and I'm glad to see he's still putting out fascinating books.

Here's the NYTimes.com review that alerted me to the book's existence: www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/books/review/18hochschild.html

And here's the Amazon.com page for it: www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374280398/sr=8-1/qid=1150676606/ref=pd_bbs_ 1/002-4545906-3446440?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Editorial Reviews

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)
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From Booklist
Famed for his geology epics (Annals of the Former World, 1998), the popular McPhee here enters the world of heavy freight. Acutely attentive, he watches what an interstate truck driver, a railroad engineer, a towboat captain, and shipmasters do to conduct safely tens of thousands of tons of conveyance and cargo to their destinations. In spare, efficient prose, McPhee indicates, rather than directs readers toward, the skill and experience of the workers. They contend with a magnitude of inertia, and their maneuvers must anticipate peril ahead by miles. McPhee admiringly evokes the balletic performance on the gears and brakes by a truck driver, and on the throttles by a towboat captain as he negotiates the constrictions of the Illinois River; unfortunately, the shipmasters seem accident-prone, grounding and colliding their vessels. Their miscues are more educational than disastrous, thankfully, occurring far from sea near the French Alps, where a maritime school teaches ship handling with models on a pond. Hitching rides to describe how coal is moved, McPhee imparts a sense of the special sociology within each transportation mode, drawing from readers both enlightenment and respect. Gilbert Taylor


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