Books like Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee

An investigative look at how fast‑food has reshaped postwar America’s food habits, labor practices, and cultural identity.

Susan Orlean tells the true story of John Laroche, a Florida plant dealer who stole rare orchids from a South Florida swamp and sparked a legal and environmental controversy in 1994.

A witty, nonfiction voyage that follows Eric Weiner from the U.S. to Iceland, India, Switzerland, Qatar, Bhutan, and Asheville as he seeks the source of happiness, blending travel, psychology, science and humor.

John McPhee’s survey of North American geology, tracing the continent’s history through detailed fieldwork, maps and essays on plate tectonics and the geological time scale.

John McPhee’s collection of essays follows four men through three distinct wildernesses—the Atlantic coastline, the Western mountain range, and the Grand Canyon’s Colorado River—examining their varied relationships with nature.

John A. McPhee examines the techniques and ideas people apply to master nature, from flood control and engineering to managing volcanic eruptions and debris avalanches.

A curated selection from John McPhee’s first twelve books, covering his early essays published between 1965 and the mid‑1970s.

"The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight--a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity--to the realm of the mundane. When most people today think of flying, they imagine tedious routines that involve security checkpoints, exorbitant baggage fees, shrinking legroom, and frustrating delays. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who gave up careers in academia and the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to re-imagine what we--both as pilots and as passengers--are actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, the author vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries, above mountains, oceans, and deserts, through snow, wind, and rain, limning a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity which can afford us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form"--