Uncommon Carriers

Starred review from April 17, 2006
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.

September 1, 2006
Adult/High School -McPhee charms readers with an insider -s 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 2006 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2006
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. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)