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  • Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee book cover
  • Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee book cover
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Uncommon Carriers

by John McPhee

The people and machinery behind freight

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AlbakiReads Editorial

The people and machinery behind freight

John McPhee’s journeys through freight transportation bring readers alongside the work that moves goods by road, rail, river, and air. The book ranges from a long-haul trip in a chemical tanker to the parcel-sorting operation at a major air hub and a towboat pushing barges along the Illinois River. Its subject is both the scale of the transport systems and the people who operate them, offering a close look at a largely practical world of vehicles, cargo, and working routines.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in transportation and freight work
  • Readers curious about trucking, rail, shipping, and air-cargo operations
  • Readers who enjoy nonfiction built around reported journeys

Themes

Freight transportationWorking lifeVehicles and infrastructureMovement of goods

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

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 the Titanic," longer even than the Queen Mary 2.

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.

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