upcarta
  • Sign In
  • Sign Up
  • Explore
  • Search

Uncommon Carriers

  • Book
  • May 16, 2006
  • #Essay
John McPhee
@JohnMcPhee
(Author)
www.goodreads.com
Hardcover
4.5/5 181 ratings
Hardcover Kindle Audiobook Audio cd
See on Goodreads
3.96/5 1.7k ratings
1 Recommender
1 Mention
1 Collection
What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, at his adventurous best, he is out and about with people who work in freight tra... Show More

What John McPhee's books all have in common is that they are about real people in real places. Here, at his adventurous best, he is out and about with people who work in freight transportation.

Over the past eight years, John McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. Uncommon Carriers is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot,
eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. McPhee attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a 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.

Uncommon Carriers is classic work by McPhee, in prose distinguished, as always, by its author's warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character.

(From Goodreads)

Show Less

Number of Pages: 248

ISBN: 0374280398

ISBN-13: 9780374280390

Recommend
Post
Save
Complete
Collect
Mentions
See All
Tommy Collison @tommycollison
  • Curated in Recommended books
Collections
See All
  • Tommy Collison
    • Collection
    Recommended books
    222 curations
  • upcarta ©2025
  • Home
  • About
  • Terms
  • Privacy
  • Cookies
  • @upcarta