The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road PDF Download

Author: Fred Afflerbach
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 089733700X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
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.

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: David Hamel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781521243848
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
A true story of how a middle-aged married couple abandon lucrative white-collar professional careers to become long-haul truck drivers for Schneider National in Green Bay, WI. David Hamel, a mechanical engineer, and Shelley Hamel, past Director of Product Development for the American Girl doll company, decide to ditch their urban life and go to truck-driving school. For David, driving school was a piece of cake. For Shelley, it was murder. Nearly flunking out of truck driving school, Shelley successfully faces her twin demons of double-clutching and ten nasty gears, and with her talented mechanical engineer husband, David, launches a 3-year experiment in alternative living before retirement. For all those people who long to quit their office jobs, team driving offers an escape not unlike full-time RVing, except you get paid to do it. This how-to guide examines life on the open road, the upside as well as the danger, with many day-to-day details of ways to maximize the freedom of exploration in this non-traditional life. Driving a semi with a 52' trailer coast to coast gives you a view of America like no other, and this book brings you right into the sleeper cab with the Hamels to share stories, tips, and firsthand experience.

Author: Steve Viscelli
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520962710
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
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.

Author: Barbara Samuels
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374378045
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
A boy who loves trucks is disappointed when he receives a cat named Lola instead of a toy fire truck, but Lola proves to be a "trucker" after all.

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: Rick L. Huffman
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781492252368
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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.

Author: Brett Aquila
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781438217055
Category : Truck drivers
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
www.truckingtruth.com Trucking schools can teach you to drive, but nobody's there to teach you everything else.This book is a no-holds-barred, call 'em as I see 'em account of what I went through when I decided to become a truck driver. I hope to shed some light on what the trucking industry is REALLY like, with no hidden agendas and no regrets.I have absolutely loved my years on the road. The experiences, the friends, the money, the challenges, and the freedom. "There are so many things to know if you want to be successful on the road and they take years to learn.I'm talking about things they don't teach in truck driving schools and things companies don't talk about..at least not honestly. There are "grey areas" and "unwritten rules" in the trucking industry that have a major impact on your life and your career - and only time on the road will reveal the reailtiesof becoming a truck driver......"- Brett Aquila, Author - "Becoming A Truck Driver:The Raw Truth About Trucking"

Author: Amy Butcher
Publisher: Little A
ISBN: 9781542014311
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The true story of two women who found meaning, strength, and friendship in one of the most punishing and magnificent landscapes on earth. Amy Butcher was an accomplished college professor, mentor, and writer, but in her own home, she was embarrassed and emotionally burdened by an increasingly abusive relationship. Exhausted and terrified of the ways her partner's behavior could escalate, Amy reached out to Instagram celebrity Joy "Mothertrucker" Wiebe. Joy was a fifty-year-old wife and mother and the nation's only female ice road trucker, a woman who maneuvered big rigs through the Alaskan wilderness along the deadliest road in America. Joy was everything Amy wanted to be: independent, fearless, and in charge of her life in a landscape dominated by men. Invited by Joy to ride shotgun, Amy found her escape on a road that was treacherous, beautiful, and exhilarating--an adventurous ride through the Alaskan wilderness that was profoundly life changing. Mothertrucker is the story of that bracing four-hundred-mile journey navigating snow-glazed overpasses, ice-blue curves, and near plummets. It's also the stories that led them both to Alaska--an interrogation of the reality of female fear, domestic violence, and how to overcome--and an exploration into just how galvanizing friendships between women can be.

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.