An entertaining and insightful snapshot of the hauling life.
A moving trucker shares stories from a life on the open road.
Murphy is not your typical trucker. As a moving truck driver, often known as “bedbuggers” hauling “roach coaches,” he describes the strict hierarchy among truckers and how his type are shunned as outsiders. He also touts his middle-class background in suburban Connecticut and his nearly completed education at Colby College, a prestigious liberal arts school in Maine, to distinguish himself from the “cowboy truckers” who think of themselves as living out some modern fantasy of the Wild West. The author even mentions his nickname “The Great White Mover,” which refers to his talent and indirectly to the industry’s widening racial gap. In fact, Murphy decided to leave college a year before graduating (much to his parents’ disapproval) to work full-time in the moving business following his experience of the camaraderie of working with a local company as a teenager. Eventually, the author worked his way up as a driver in the “high-end executive relocation” business, where he routinely makes cross-country hauls for his high-profile clients. Throughout his recollections, Murphy maintains an air of armchair philosopher, imparting common-sense wisdom and morals from three decades behind the wheel. With carefully retold anecdotes that illustrate the minutiae of life as a trucker, Murphy sheds light on this unique subculture. More than anything, he uses the narrative to combat the negative stigma against movers, taking jabs at past customers who slighted him. One story in particular fittingly encapsulates the author’s background and mission: he purposely placed an abusive customer’s antique Chinese gravestones upside down (he took a course in college) to embarrass the owner, who wouldn’t have noticed. Ultimately, the behind-the-scenes appeal of Murphy’s stories fades a bit after several chapters, but they shed light on a world not experienced by most.
An entertaining and insightful snapshot of the hauling life.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-60871-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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