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Uncommon Carriers, by John McPhee: McPhee spends time with a long-distance tanker truck driver, barge crews, the staff of the UPS hub in Louisville, and coal train. The tanker truck section includes the driver's opinions of people who drive everything smaller on the roads (from passenger cars to box trucks and buses). In the railroad section McPhee talks about unions, and there's a little about train spotters and hobos.
This is the sort of narrative non-fiction McPhee has been doing well for a long time. I bounced off a couple of his books in the early 2000s, and then decided to try McPhee again a couple of months ago, looking at what I could get from the library in e-book form. I enjoyed this, and will probably add another McPhee or two to my library hold list. This is from 2006, meaning the part of the book about the coal trains talks about coal mines and trains being busier than they had been in a couple of decades. McPhee and his informations don't mention cind, solar, and the shut-downs of older coal-burning plants aren't mentioned, though automation in rail dispatching and package sorting and loading are, When McPhee wrote this, UPS wasn't just one of the world's largest airlines, it had gotten into the education business at the community-college level.
Reading aloud:
Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons; Cattitude and Adrian sometimes passed the book back and forth in mid-paragraph because one of them was laughing too much to continue. The book and its over-the-top descriptions very funny, even without my being familiar with what it's parodying. It's also oddly and incidentally science-fictional, with offhand references to the "Anglo-Nicaraguan war of 1946," and there are video phones, but set in a society where it's unremarkable to take a horse-drawn wagon into town to use a phone there.
The Sirens Sang of Murder, by Sarah Caudwell. I had read this, but enough years ago that I remembered almost nothing. A humorous mystery, with occasional comments by the characters about feeling like they are in an old-fashioned detective novel, and no writer would use that sort of clue nowadays.
(Also, I've reread some things that don't particularly seem worth noting here.)
This is the sort of narrative non-fiction McPhee has been doing well for a long time. I bounced off a couple of his books in the early 2000s, and then decided to try McPhee again a couple of months ago, looking at what I could get from the library in e-book form. I enjoyed this, and will probably add another McPhee or two to my library hold list. This is from 2006, meaning the part of the book about the coal trains talks about coal mines and trains being busier than they had been in a couple of decades. McPhee and his informations don't mention cind, solar, and the shut-downs of older coal-burning plants aren't mentioned, though automation in rail dispatching and package sorting and loading are, When McPhee wrote this, UPS wasn't just one of the world's largest airlines, it had gotten into the education business at the community-college level.
Reading aloud:
Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons; Cattitude and Adrian sometimes passed the book back and forth in mid-paragraph because one of them was laughing too much to continue. The book and its over-the-top descriptions very funny, even without my being familiar with what it's parodying. It's also oddly and incidentally science-fictional, with offhand references to the "Anglo-Nicaraguan war of 1946," and there are video phones, but set in a society where it's unremarkable to take a horse-drawn wagon into town to use a phone there.
The Sirens Sang of Murder, by Sarah Caudwell. I had read this, but enough years ago that I remembered almost nothing. A humorous mystery, with occasional comments by the characters about feeling like they are in an old-fashioned detective novel, and no writer would use that sort of clue nowadays.
(Also, I've reread some things that don't particularly seem worth noting here.)
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