by

Nicki Leone

 

I think I wanna be John McPhee. Talk about the perfect job! The guy just wanders around the country, stopping now and then to write about whatever catches his interest—and his interest is caught by all sorts of weird stuff: why people go off to die in Alaska. Where oranges come from. The life of the shad fish. The origins and history of the cattle brand. And most recently, Uncommon Carriers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $24), his homage to the freight industry—a riveting subject if ever there was one.

Therein lies McPhee’s talent. He must be one of the most inquisitive and enthusiastic creatures on the planet, and his enthusiasm spills all over his subject and basically gets itself all over his readers. I have been a fan of McPhee from way on back and I still find myself drenched with his innate excitement whenever I open one of his books. Enthusiasm is contagious.

When McPhee writes about the freight industry, he isn’t talking about the logistics behind UPS, or the hassles suffered by passengers at the mercy of an out-gunned airline industry. He is talking about the really big stuff: trucks with at least 18 wheels. People who captain ocean-going tankers that take more than an hour to come to a full stop. Pilots who fly the massive cargo planes over oceans and that will never show an in-flight movie. He rides on freight trains that race across the plains at ninety miles an hour, and river barges that race up rivers at about four knots. Wherever there is a way to move a large amount of very heavy stuff a very long distance, he has poked his nose into it, much to the bemusement of the men and women who make their living on this unseen foundation of modern life.

Usually it takes a novel to get me interested in this stuff (in fact, two of my favorite novels involve life on tankers: The Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith and Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg). I can honestly say that I have never, not once, thought to be curious about all the colored placards on the tanker trucks I pass on the highway—except of course to give them a wide berth (because anyone who has ever seen a Hollywood movie knows that tanker trucks explode at the least provocation).  

Thanks to McPhee’s insatiably curious nature, I now know that alcohol is considered a class 3 hazmat (hazardous material) and that the difference between Beefeater and Glenlivet is in its flashpoint—the first is flammable (will catch fire) and the latter is combustible (will explode with very little provocation)—that must be the stuff in all those tankers in the movies.

It is no accident that one thinks of various bestselling novels when reading Uncommon Carriers—John McPhee was a pioneer in the art of not making nonfiction boring. His very first book, A Sense of Where You Are (1965), issued in the new era of “literary nonfiction” by shamelessly using a novelist’s techniques with dialogue and description to bring his subject—the basketball player Bill Bradley—vividly to life. McPhee has continued to write in this vein over the next forty-odd years and twenty-odd books, and he can claim the distinction of creating a whole new literary genre with hundreds of grateful followers including writers like Simon Winchester (Krakatoa), Sebastian Junger (Perfect Storm), Erik Larson (Devil in the White City) and Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit).

But unlike John Krakauer (Into Thin Air) or Tony Horowitz (Confederates in the Attic), McPhee has an old-school ethic of not injecting his own views into his topic. He still believes in the journalist’s creed “be objective” and he understands that there is a difference between empathy and sympathy. As a result, his books remain refreshingly free of the proselytizing and frenetic diatribes that mar so much of the nonfiction published today. Even when McPhee is writing on emotional subjects—environmentalism, for example, or development—his first priority is always the people, not the cause.  

Although it is about big subjects—big trucks, and very big boats—Uncommon Carriers is not a long book, especially for someone who has been working on it for at least eight years. It is really more a series of vignettes or sketches, portraying some of the fascinating people McPhee has discovered as he routed around in umpteen docks and shipyards and truck stops, and some of the fascinating stuff they do. But the book lacks the scope of some of McPhee’s earlier works—lacks, perhaps, any underlying big question to be answered—such as the “What makes people leave it all behind and go off into the wilderness?” question that makes his book on Alaska, Coming Into the Country, so perennially seductive. Perhaps, too, a man who has a fondness for geology and has written several books on the rise and fall of mountain ranges can’t help but see these trucks and trains as fragile and ephemeral motes skittering across the surface of the disinterested planet. People who write about geology have a different idea about the concept of “long-term” or “permanent.”

But although he is not really asking why men move mountains (of stuff, all over the place), there is plenty to hold our attention in how they do it. McPhee scatters facts like pearls across his pages—the reader can’t help but stop to pick them up. By the end of the book the reader is possessed of all sorts of extraneous trivia that could really be annoying at parties. (Does one really need to know that the tanks of cement trucks are cleaned with high-pressure sugar water?) But more importantly, they have learned enough about the freight industry that the next time they pull into a gas station and see its tanks being filled by some shiny round tanker sprouting hoses and warning signs, they will know what exactly what they are looking at.

And knowing what you are looking at makes the world a more interesting, more fun place to live. That is the job of a writer, after all—to help us to see the weird and wonderful world right in front of our eyes. In this, McPhee never fails.
 


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College, supporting her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore. Since then, she has been in and out of academic institutions, but has always managed to work with books no matter what. She began working for Bristol Books, an independent bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993, and three years later became its manager, which is where she stayed for the next fifteen years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki is a book reviewer for several magazines, an occasional on-air book reviewer and commentator for the Wilmington public radio station WHQR, and a co-host on the television program "Let's Read" on UNCW. She is one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, and currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of three dogs and two cats. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it