Vivid memories successfully combine working-class pragmatism with romantic glimpses of America’s open road.
In this blue-collar memoir, a writer shines bright lights on the long-haul trucking industry.
In 1973, Clark (Back Door to L.A., 2016, etc.) lied about his experience and got hired by Chicago’s oldest moving company, Hebard Storage. At age 23, he learned to load and unload trucks using a “hump strap” to balance boxes on his back. Though the hours were long and sweaty, the job was more about problem-solving than brawn, writes the author, who learned how to fit a 10-foot sofa through an 8-foot doorway. After Hebard fired Clark (he would work for the company again in the future), he obtained his driver’s license and became a full-time, long-haul trucker, once logging as many as 12,000 miles through 19 American states and one Canadian province. Dreaming of becoming a writer, he also worked on a detective novel and took a journalism class. With prose that hums as smoothly as an 18-wheeler on a wide-open interstate, the author tells memorable—and sometimes startling—anecdotes. Once he accompanied a morgue driver on a pickup of bodies bound for Chicago’s Potter’s Field. But these colorful memories mostly highlight the lively working folks Clark met, and they’re likable—though sometimes dark. For example, there was Bill, a huge man with a 1950s flattop haircut, who gulped gin at lunch and ran afoul of the law. Bill was also an amazing worker who could pull Clark and a piano up the stairs at the same time. Then there was Sam, a Yugoslavian immigrant who sadly ended up in a potter’s field. The author’s nitty-gritty adventures are often gripping—in one nightmarish late-night scene, he came upon a horrific accident. On a different run, his own truck jackknifed. Sometimes these cleareyed anecdotes contain compelling history lessons. Once during the 1979 independent truckers’ strike, his tire was shot. And according to Clark—who at one point drove with his girlfriend—negative attitudes about female truckers began to change when husband-and-wife teams had the best safety records in the industry.
Vivid memories successfully combine working-class pragmatism with romantic glimpses of America’s open road.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 252
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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