Author: Leslie Purdon
Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing
ISBN: 1908397993
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
In the late 1940s, Shay leaves school as soon as he can to become a trailer-boy on a Gardner truck that is noisy, cold and limited in speed. The driver, Fred, is one of the old school, a transport man through and through, who knows the best cafes and pubs and all the tricks of the trade. Shay soon comes to love this life on the road despite long hours and frequent absences from his home in Kent. In those days, lorries were less able to cope with bad weather. "Truckers North" includes a vivid account of the terrible winter of 1947 when twenty miles an hour was an achievement and the powerful vehicles were dangerous to handle. Shay encountered some lively characters: the drivers who worked, played and joked hard; the kindly landladies who provide a home from home; Rosy who awoke the man in the boy. Shay progressed in his career, moving on to become a driver himself and finally the proud owner of his own HGV.
Author: Ed Miller
Publisher: Apollo Publishers
ISBN: 1948062399
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 181
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Book Description
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’.
Author: Anne Balay
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469647109
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Long-haul trucking is linked to almost every industry in America, yet somehow the working-class drivers behind big rigs remain largely hidden from public view. Gritty, inspiring, and often devastating oral histories of gay, transsexual, and minority truck drivers allow award-winning author Anne Balay to shed new light on the harsh realities of truckers' lives behind the wheel. A licensed commercial truck driver herself, Balay discovers that, for people routinely subjected to prejudice, hatred, and violence in their hometowns and in the job market, trucking can provide an opportunity for safety, welcome isolation, and a chance to be themselves--even as the low-wage work is fraught with tightening regulations, constant surveillance, danger, and exploitation. The narratives of minority and queer truckers underscore the working-class struggle to earn a living while preserving one's safety, dignity, and selfhood. Through the voices of drivers from marginalized communities who spend eleven- to fourteen-hour days hauling America's commodities in treacherous weather and across mountain passes, Semi Queer reveals the stark differences between the trucking industry's crushing labor practices and the perseverance of its most at-risk workers.
Author: Finn Murphy
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393608727
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 167
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Book Description
“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.
Author: Rolene
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1477133941
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
A Tale of Two Truckers tells the story of the transition of the author from a perfectly normal life into the predominantly male operated trucking industry in the early 1980’s and the trials she endured. The story takes you back to a lifestyle and time many young people today could never imagine becasue there was little technology - not even mobile phones! The tale reveals the relentless struggles and challenges she faced along with her partner Randy, and her dog named Hooter, as they ventured forth to secure a career in the trucking industry. She fi nds herself in unimaginable and sometimes frightful predicaments, taking her readers with her into a world they never knew existed. Maintaining her sense of humor throughout the ordeal, she is not afraid to tell it like it was, something her trucker partner Randy, never would have done.
Author: Stephen Deusner
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477323937
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
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.
Author: James Mottern
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 118
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Book Description
Author: Leslie Purdon
Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing
ISBN: 1908397969
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 141
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Book Description
"Leslie Purdon lives and breathes trucking" - "Truck and Driver". It's the 1970s. Trucker Dennis Richardson (Rich) revels in the laughs and camaraderie of his life on the road. He sets up a transport company, North Kent, with two pals. Benny is the one with the short fuse; Rich tries to calm him down - when he's not winding him up. The irrepressible Chuckles has his own way of dealing with tachographs and then there's the indispensable Jean, the rock on which they rest. The determined team go through humorous, and sometimes extreme, exploits as they strive to stay afloat. They run legal when they can and cut corners when necessary, gambling on the new Scandinavian trucks that are changing the industry. They are cheated out of their earnings - but still come up smiling.
Author: Rajat Ubhaykar
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9386797658
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
"The share auto I squeeze into next seems unusually vulnerable after a night in the truck - too compact, too low down. Perhaps, these are the usual side effects of prolonged riding with the king of the road, I think to myself. But it is only when I fill in ‘truck’ as my mode of transportation in the hotel ledger at Udaipur does the utter ludicrousness of my endeavour truly hit home" Think truck drivers, and movie scenes of them drunkenly crushing inconvenient people to their gravelly deaths come to mind. But what are their lives on the road actually like? In Truck De India!, journalist Rajat Ubhaykar embarks on a 10,000 km-long, 100% unplanned trip, hitchhiking with truckers all across India. On the way, he makes unexpected friendships; listens to highway ghost stories; discovers the near-fatal consequences of overloading trucks; documents the fascinating tradition of truck art in Punjab; travels alongside nomadic shepherds in Kashmir; encounters endemic corruption repeatedly; survives NH39, the insurgent-ridden highway through Nagaland and Manipur; and is unfailingly greeted by the unconditional kindness of perfect strangers. Imbued with humour, empathy, and a keen sense of history, Truck De India! is a travelogue like no other you've read. It is the story of India, and Indians, on the road.
Author: Rothe, J. Peter (John Peter)
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412839402
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
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.
