Download or read book The Long Haul A Trucker s Tales of Life on the Road written by Finn Murphy and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “There’s nothing semi about Finn Murphy’s trucking tales of The Long Haul.”—Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair More than thirty years ago, Finn Murphy dropped out of college to become a long-haul trucker. Since then he’s covered more than a million miles as a mover, packing, loading, hauling people’s belongings all over America. In The Long Haul, Murphy recounts with wit, candor, and charm the America he has seen change over the decades and the poignant, funny, and often haunting stories of the people he encounters on the job.

Download or read book Roll On written by Fred Afflerbach and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roll On celebrates the freedom of the open road. The reader rides shotgun in an aging yet durable Peterbilt diesel rig on an interstate odyssey with longtime independent truck driver, Ubi Sunt. Traversing the Painted Desert, the Black Hills of South Dakota, and through the nation's breadbasket into the gritty northeast, you will meet misfits, wayfarers and dreamers . In the literary tradition of escape and return, and journey to enlightenment, Ubi faces tough choices. The highway is home but the road is changing. And his only daughter offers an ultimatum: Settle down or else.

Download or read book The Big Rig written by Steve Viscelli and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long-haul trucks have been described as sweatshops on wheels. The typical long-haul trucker works the equivalent of two full-time jobs, often for little more than minimum wage. But it wasn’t always this way. Trucking used to be one of the best working-class jobs in the United States. The Big Rig explains how this massive degradation in the quality of work has occurred, and how companies achieve a compliant and dedicated workforce despite it. Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews and years of extensive observation, including six months training and working as a long-haul trucker, Viscelli explains in detail how labor is recruited, trained, and used in the industry. He then shows how inexperienced workers are convinced to lease a truck and to work as independent contractors. He explains how deregulation and collective action by employers transformed trucking’s labor markets--once dominated by the largest and most powerful union in US history--into an important example of the costs of contemporary labor markets for workers and the general public.

Download or read book King of The Road written by Alex Debogorski and published by Penguin Canada. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The highest-rated reality show ever to hit History Television, Ice Road Truckers follows the heart-pounding adventures of the tough-as-nails truckers who risk peril every day to deliver goods and supplies in Alaska and across Canada's frozen north. Alex Debogorski shares tales of his adventures, and misadventures, in the north, and explains, in his own entertaining voice, how he got to where he is today—a working-class hero, bona fide celebrity, and the improbable star of a smash-hit television show. Debogorski is a natural storyteller who knows how to spin tales about his colourful life growing up in the backwoods. Whether he's recounting tales about his hair-raising confrontations with bears, calculating the strength of newly formed ice, divulging the secrets of providing security in a barroom full of combative, drunken miners, or saving the life of another trucker, he keeps readers wanting more. King of the Road gives fans of Ice Road Truckers a deep look inside the life and times of the show's biggest rising star.

Download or read book A Trucker s Tale written by Ed Miller and published by Apollo Publishers. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wit, wisdom, adventure, and revelations from sixty years on the road. They say that only truck drivers experience the true grandeur and landscape of America: the winding mountainsides at sunrise, the first frosts of winter descending on apple orchards, the call of the rising roosters. In A Trucker's Tale, Ed Miller gives an inside look at the allure of the work and the colorful characters who haul our goods on the open road. He shares what it was like to grow up in a boisterous trucking family, his experience as an equipment officer in Vietnam, the wide range of vehicles he's mounted, and the daily trials, tribulations, risks, and exploits that define life as a trucker. Ed's vibrant, no-holds-barred tales are hilarious and heartwarming, sometimes cringeworthy or unbelievable—recollections of heroic feels as well as the “fishing stories” that have stretched and shifted from CB radio to CB radio. Many are the results of what he calls, “just plain stupidity.” Others bring to light the small acts of kindness and grand gestures that these Knights of the Highway perform each day, as well as the safety risks and continual danger that these essential workers endure. Together they paint a compelling portrait of one of the most important, but least-known industries, and reveal why Ed, and so many like him, just kept on truckin’.

Download or read book Killer on the Road written by Ginger Strand and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the correlation between the construction of the Interstate Highway system and the rise in the national murder rate, highlighting specific killers and how the highway system changed America.

Download or read book Galaxy Trucker Rocky Road written by Jason A. Holt and published by . This book was released on 2023-10-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fran thought that galaxy trucking would be her dream job. No one told her about the meteors on Route 135. Her trucks keep getting smashed to bits and now she's deep in debt. Does she need a new route or a new career?Maybe she just needs a friend.Galaxy Trucker: Rocky Road is the sort of science fiction novel where a space truck can go faster than light, but a truck driver can still see traffic in her rearview mirror. This book has laser cannons! Space pirates! And oh so many meteors.So buckle up for a ride with Francesca Flores and her alien possibly-soon-to-be-sidekick as they confront astronomical dangers in an attempt to deliver one load of sewer pipes.

Download or read book Trucking Country written by Shane Hamilton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trucking Country is a social history of long-haul trucking that explores the contentious politics of free-market capitalism in post-World War II America. Shane Hamilton paints an eye-opening portrait of the rural highways of the American heartland, and in doing so explains why working-class populist voters are drawn to conservative politicians who seemingly don't represent their financial interests. Hamilton challenges the popular notion of "red state" conservatism as a devil's bargain between culturally conservative rural workers and economically conservative demagogues in the Republican Party. The roots of rural conservatism, Hamilton demonstrates, took hold long before the culture wars and free-market fanaticism of the 1990s. As Hamilton shows, truckers helped build an economic order that brought low-priced consumer goods to a greater number of Americans. They piloted the big rigs that linked America's factory farms and agribusiness food processors to suburban supermarkets across the country. Trucking Country is the gripping account of truckers whose support of post-New Deal free enterprise was so virulent that it sparked violent highway blockades in the 1970s. It's the story of "bandit" drivers who inspired country songwriters and Hollywood filmmakers to celebrate the "last American cowboy," and of ordinary blue-collar workers who helped make possible the deregulatory policies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and set the stage for Wal-Mart to become America's most powerful corporation in today's low-price, low-wage economy. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Download or read book The Meaning of Names written by Karen Gettert Shoemaker and published by Red Hen Press. This book was released on 2014-03-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A German-American woman copes with a pandemic, and her neighbors’ hostility during the Great War, in “a heart-rending story of endurance” (Historical Novel Society). Stuart, Nebraska is a long way from the battlefields of Western Europe, but it is not immune to the horrors of the first Great War for Peace. Like all communities, it has lost sons and daughters to the fighting, with many more giving themselves over to the hatred only war can engender. Set in 1918 in the farm country at the heart of America, The Meaning of Names is the story of an ordinary woman trying to raise a family during extraordinary times. Estranged from her parents because she married against their will, confronted with violence and prejudice against her people, and caught up in the midst of the worst plague the world has ever seen, Gerda Vogel, an American of German descent, must find the strength to keep her family safe from the effects of a war that threatens to consume the whole world. “Suddenly, ‘liberty cabbage’ replaces ‘sauerkraut’ on food menus, job advertisements warn ‘no krauts need apply,’ and neighbors demand the nearby university stop teaching courses in ‘that vile language’. . . . Shoemaker crafts eminently realistic characters; her descriptions of unreasonable fear and hatred are particularly effective.” —Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Trucking for Jesus written by Bunny Gregory and published by Tate Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Christian's journey is not always easy. Life as a trucker on the road is not easy either. There are long, lonely hours, unpredictable storms, winding roads that never seem to end, and sometimes it's easy to forget God in the midst of it all. But God is faithful, the theme of this inspiring daily devotional. In this book, Chaplains Bunny and Blonnie Gregory share ways to beat the highway blues with stories of the miracles that they have experienced while ministering to truckers onboard Sheneeda (because she needa lot of love, just like the rest of us), their mobile chapel pulled by their Kenworth truck, and inside truck stops all across the country. Each devotion offers a Bible verse to reflect on, a short story, a real-life application, and a prayer for readers. There are devotions on faith, kindness, prayer, and more. Some are humorous and some are a little more serious, but each one offers hope and encouragement for truckers on the long road ahead and shows that in the end, we're all Trucking for Jesus. Chaplains Bunny and Blonnie Gregory have traveled the U.S. highways coast to coast with their mobile chapel since 1975, dedicating their lives to ministering to the truckers and to all others who have come aboard their church on wheels. When not on the road, the two live in Virginia.

Download or read book Where the Devil Don t Stay written by Stephen Deusner and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the twenty-first century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically. Seeing the Truckers’ albums as roadmaps through a landscape that is half-real, half-imagined, their fellow Southerner Stephen Deusner travels to the places the band’s members have lived in and written about. Tracking the band from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to the author’s hometown in McNairy County, Tennessee, Deusner explores the Truckers’ complex relationship to the South and the issues of class, race, history, and religion that run through their music. Drawing on new interviews with past and present band members, including Jason Isbell, Where the Devil Don’t Stay is more than the story of a great American band; it’s a reflection on the power of music and how it can frame and shape a larger culture.

Download or read book NEW TO OTR written by Chris Aragon and published by Dorrance Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chris Aragon provides a direct, somewhat cynical, and slightly gruff look at the everyday tasks and responsibilities of being an Over The Road Truck Driver as an employee of a very large trucking company. Hollywood has always painted the public picture of what yesterday’s trucker looked like, but Chris’s hard toned look at the modern and highly regulated Commercial Drivers License paints a much different picture. With Road Safety at the center, Chris attempts to explain some of the complexity that is today’s Trucking Industry for the Non-Owner-Operator of the 18 Wheeler Culture. From the starting point of obtaining a Class A Commercial Driver’s License to the day to day dealings with company management to the suggestions for comfort while out on a national tour, Chris lays his no nonsense approach out in a raw sense without the hidden meanings tucked in the folds. In Chris’s previous full career as a Corrections Officer Sergeant in a maximum security setting, he developed a Funny Frowned Face as opposed to a poker face in communicating his thoughts. Chris often jokes about his Grumpy Personality with many of his friends and family and he hopes that the raw and pungent outlay doesn’t protrude itself as overly provocative to any reader.

Download or read book The Trucker s World written by Rothe, J. Peter (John Peter) and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about truck driver's lives, risks, and views on safety. As "a "group, truckers represent a significant population of road users whose high-exposure driving creates a major challenge for safety. Research into the larger social, political, and economic forces that affect trucker's safety problems has been scarce. "The Trucker's World "comes to terms with the socioeconomic environment that contributes to breakdown in trucker safety and chronicles the lives and times of truckers as they try to make ends meet. It analyzes driver risk by exploring the reasons, reactions, and consequences of risk. The author approaches his task with a research question: Why is the average trucker continuously placed in conditions that, according to truckers, demand risky driving? As a result of direct experience with truckers and trucking, Rothe observes that truck drivers act as they do to gain autonomy over their work, freedom from control of others, and assurance of a reasonable livelihood. In order to maintain a sufficient income in the transportation market, even the most serious drivers perform tasks that often impinge on lethality and safety, not as blatant radicals or daredevils fighting the system, but as persons responding to the fear that they may lose their livelihood in trucking. The thrust in trucker safety has followed a victimization philosophy in which emphasis on interventions has been aimed directly at truckers. Rothe contends that safety programs would work better if they emphasized what influences, motivates, or encourages truckers to take chances on the road. With this in mind, he analyzes driver risk, vehicle maintenance, owner-operator, company driver, policing, home life, drugs and alcohol, government regulations, and hours of service as they are seen by truckers, industry officials, and others. Expanding our vision to encompass essential factors in the socioeconomic reality of the truck-driving culture. Rothe elucidates the far-reaching consequences that safety issues have for truckers, other road users, policymakers, and traffic safety educators.

Download or read book The Ghost Fleet The Whole Goddamned Thing written by Donny Cates and published by Image Comics. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the world's most valuable, dangerous, or secretive cargo, you don't call just any trucking service...you call THE GHOST FLEET. When one of the world's most elite combat-trained truckers takes a forbidden peek at his payload, he uncovers a conspiracy that will change his life, and the world, forever! The critically acclaimed eight-issue miniseries is collected for the very first time in one deluxe, over-the-top volume from DONNY CATES (GOD COUNTRY, REDNECK) and the incredible DANIEL WARREN JOHNSON (EXTREMITY). Collects THE GHOST FLEET #1-8

Download or read book Trucker Ghost Stories written by Annie Wilder and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of firsthand accounts from truckers who have driven all over the United States and have encountered strange and unusual phenomenons which can only be described as paranormal.

Download or read book Spirit of the Road written by Rick L. Huffman and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2013-07-07 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spirit of the Road: The Life of an American Trucker...and his cat embarks on a one-year journey across the United States in an eighteen-wheeler. It runs the gambit from a wide-eyed rookie in Commercial Driving school to the eventual embracing of a new lifestyle at a dusty little truck stop in Crab Orchard, Tennessee.Having made the transition to trucking after spending 20 years in television broadcasting, the author sets a comical tone from the very first chapter in a “fish-out-of-water” story. However, the dangers and challenges of life in a big truck are very real, and the book takes on a more somber tone to describe this aspect of road life. The reader is also introduced to little-known, funny, or unusual historical facts about some of the places visited while they are along for the ride. The objective of this book is to give the reader an entertaining, yet candid, picture of the life of a long haul trucker with a little slice of Americana on the side. This book always keeps the reader in mind, and strives to both inform and entertain. Another unique feature is the inclusion of a traveling cat in the story. The comical and, sometimes, poignant adventures of “Kitty” are interwoven throughout the book and promises to hold appeal for pet lovers. The trucking lifestyle has been depicted in various television series and movies and, as with any job that holds a degree of adventure and danger, it sparks the interest of the general public. The life of the American trucker still holds a bit of the rugged explorer's lifestyle. The trucker is usually far from home and uncertain what lies around the next bend. Curiosity about the unknown is an attractive feature to the general reader. Spirit of the Road: The Life of an American Trucker is a book that touches into a cornerstone of a lifestyle that few people know about, but that hides a passionate group that bears further study, namely, truck drivers.

Download or read book Bumping the Dock A Story of God s Grace and an 18 Wheeler written by Annette F. Wilcox and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I am an unlikely person to be a long-haul trucker. People comment that I look more like a librarian or an English teacher than a trucker. And I have been both. Trucking is physically a little too hard for me. Perhaps for this reason, my life as a trucker has been one of radical dependence on God. The truck runs, after all, by grace, and I'm on the road only as long as God wants me to be. I have truly experienced that God's mercies are new every morning and are inexhaustible. He always helps! That's what this story is about.