Uncommon Carriers

This is a book about people who drive trucks, captain ships, pilot towboats, drive coal trains, and carry lobsters through the air: people who work in freight transportation. John McPhee rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, five-axle, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats--in Ainsworth's opinion "the world's most beautiful truck," so highly polished you could part your hair while looking at it. He goes "out in the sort" among the machines that process a million packages a day at UPS Air's distribution hub at Louisville International Airport. And (among other trips) he travels up the "tight-assed" Illinois River on a towboat pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being "a good deal longer than theTitanic," longer even than theQueen Mary 2. Uncommon Carriersis classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character. John McPhee is a staff writer atThe New Yorker. He is the author of twenty-nine books, all published by FSG. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey. This is a book about people who drive trucks, captain ships, pilot towboats, drive coal trains, and carry lobsters through the air: people who work in freight transportation. John McPhee rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, five-axle, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats--in Ainsworth's opinion "the world's most beautiful truck," so highly polished you could part your hair while looking at it. He goes "out in the sort" among the machines that process a million packages a day at UPS Air's distribution hub at Louisville International Airport. And (among other trips) he travels up the "tight-assed" Illinois River on a towboat pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being "a good deal longer than theTitanic," longer even than theQueen Mary 2. Uncommon Carriersis classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character. "We often read about people in glamorous professions--surgeons, actors, musicians, writers--but so seldom about those who do the jobs we all depend on, those who transport raw materials on river barges, or haul the coal that generates electricity. If the human race survives another century or two, many of these jobs will vanish . . . and McPhee's work will provide an invaluable record of how those primitive people back in 2006, however heedless they were of what they were doing to their planet to their planet, treasured their bygone crafts."--Adam Hochschild,The New York Book Review "We often read about people in glamorous professions--surgeons, actors, musicians, writers--but so seldom about those who do the jobs we all depend on, those who transport raw materials on river barges, or haul the coal that generates electricity. If the human race survives another century or two, many of these jobs will vanish (they're already talking about running trains by remote control), and McPhee's work will provide an invaluable record of how those primitive people back in 2006, however heedless they were of what they were doing to their planet, treasured their bygone crafts . . . I hope he'll take us for rides on some more uncommon carriers at [age] 85, perhaps a space station or a Mars rover or a submersible looking at what we've don

John McPhee is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of twenty- nine books, all published by FSG. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

“To read the studious John McPhee in this sensationalist age, when so many other literary journalists are shrieking from some self-aggrandizing edge, is to be reminded of what the genre should be—artfully reported stories that illuminate who we are.�—Robert Braile, The Boston Globe