Uncommon Carriers

About this book

McPhee's books are about real people in real places. Over the past eight years, McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. This 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. He 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 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.--From publisher description.

Appears in these reading paths

John McPhee Reading Order: Where to Start

Beginner12books70 hrs4 stages

C

@craftsherpa♥ 0

Related reading guides

• Best Books on Reliability and Maintainability Engineering, in Order
• How to Learn Traffic and Transportation Engineering from Books, in Order
• How to Learn Biblical Hebrew from Books, in Order
• How to Learn Vietnamese from Books, in Order