From a review of John McPhee’s latest book, Uncommon Carriers:
This is also the theme that ties together “Uncommon Carriers,” almost all of which, like McPhee’s previous books, first appeared as New Yorker articles. Small boys dream of being the driver of a giant tractor trailer that towers over the family car, or of piloting a ship, or (most of all in my day) of being a railroad engineer. Three portraits of people at work in these professions are the core of this new collection, which includes several shorter pieces also related to transportation: one about a pond in France where sea captains pay $15,000 for a weeklong ship-handling course using scale models, one retracing Thoreau’s canoe journey on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and one about the innards of United Parcel Service.