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BOOKS

Words by Mike Bandler

Hit the road, John

John McPhee puts his unique spin on yet another seemingly banal subject in his new book, Uncommon Carriers.

John McPhee is a genial, careful craftsman—a renaissance man who rarely gives interviews. From his native Princeton, New Jersey, where he has resided most of his life (and teaches on the Ivy League campus), he ventures across the country and even abroad in search of topics that pique his curiosity.

The staff writer for The New Yorker is renowned for exploring eclectic topics. One critic, in fact, suggested that McPhee “deliberately chooses unpromising subjects, just to show what he can do with them.” And what he does with them is stunning.

He began just over 40 years ago with a salute to a homeboy, Bill Bradley, then mightily shooting hoops as a Princeton senior. In due course, McPhee’s subjects included a prep school headmaster, art history, his own Scottish heritage, professional tennis, aeronautical research, the impact of the nuclear age, plate tectonics, the geology of California, the birchbark canoe, art smuggling and the American shad, to name but a few.

McPhee is now in his mid-seventies, but from the evidence in his newest book, Uncommon Carriers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24), he must be pretty laidback or he wouldn’t be able to impose himself, as he does so effortlessly, on rough-hewn roadies, scientists and engineers alike. The folks he’s hung out with over the past eight years are the relatively faceless men and women who transport all manner of goods across America, from the drivers of eighteen-wheelers to the pilots of towboats on waterways such as the Illinois River, whose transport history goes back to the earliest days of the nation. Meticulously, he probes the technology and street-smarts that are a trademark part of his craft.

McPhee’s travels take him to a fi ve-day course working with mini-vessels at a ship-handling school on a lake in the French Alps, and, for another fi ve days, onto the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in the wake of Thoreau. He offers a glimpse of UPS operations shipping everything from Nova Scotia lobsters to Louisville Slugger bats. And we ride alongside the author as he discovers the impact of the coal train and the coal industry’s evolution on our lives.

Ultimately, he returns for a fi nal ride in Don Ainsworth’s eighteen-wheeler, one of the two million big trucks on US highways (think about that next time you jockey for space with one of those behemoths). All in all, it’s quite a journey, opening our eyes to things we generally take for granted.

Celebrity reads…

Two of TV’s Sunday-night-at-nine divas have put pen to paper. Desperate housewife Teri Hatcher’s Burnt Toast (Hyperion, $24.95) is now in bookstores, and On the Couch (Putnam, $25.95) by Lorraine Bracco, a.k.a. Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Tony Soprano’s therapist) is arriving this month.

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