Within Arm's Reach

Within Arm's Length: The Extraordinary Life and Career of a Special Agent in the United States Secret Service
© 2014, 2018 Dan Emmett
320 pages

Dan Emmett was a kid when he witnessed President Kennedy's assassination on television, but instead of being shaken by the abrupt loss, he was intrigued by another person shown on the tape - -a man who, as the shots hit Kennedy, was climbing over the seats in an effort to shield the president with his own body.  After a tour of duty with the Marines, Emmett applied to join the service that he thought so admirable as a child, and served in it for over ten years, protecting three presidents as well as numerous other..  Although not all agents protect the president, he was one of those who did, and in this memoir he tells a little bit about the training and the job.  Readers interested in learning more about the men under protection should not expect to find much of interest here; Emmett considers tell-alls not only unprofessional, but vulgar.  Instead, he writes about the training and some of the practices of the secret service, like having a tail car with a camera for the express purpose of capturing a president's death on camera if it does happen. Secret service agents are expected to be extraordinarily competent, proficient in both combat and triage, and those who work with the presidential detail also have to be diplomats, especially if they're charged with the initial site inspection and preparation for a presidential visits and have to convince local officials to make adjustments in their practices.  Although service agents are regarded as brave, Emmett writes that the intensive training makes responses like jumping in front of the president reflexive. Even so, their choice of occupation is courageous. The presidential detail itself is physically brutal, as agents sometimes forgo meals and sleep in an effort to keep up with a traveling president's schedule. Most burn out within five years, and -- like Emmett -- retire to join another government service.  In Emmett's case, that was the CIA, but of course he says even less about it.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory
© 2014 Caitlin Doughty
272 pages

Memento mori -- remember your death. Young Caitlin Doughty couldn't help but remember it; as a child she was traumatized by the memory of another girl her age plummeting to her death inside a shopping mall.  The event led to episodes of compulsive behavior as Caitlin did whatever she could to keep the Boatman at bay, whether that be avoiding stepping on newly-fallen leaves or drooling into her shirt.  A slightly older Caitlin, one facing adulthood, realized she had to face Death, too: so she started working at a crematory.   There, faced on a daily basis with faces of decay,  she began to realize that her unhealthy obsession with avoiding Death --  avoiding  facing the reality of it -- was endemic to modern society,  and began to chart a new course for herself, as someone who sought to help people deal with death in a more healthy manner.

Corpses aside, this is a funny book -- but one with a serious heart.  Caitlin uses her experiences at her first funeral home -- with a good bit of physical and morbid comedy as she learns the ropes --  to review how  death and funerary practices have changed in the United States,  and to explain what actually goes in during cremation or embalming.   For most of history, death was an everyday reality, inescapable. Disease and famine  were never far away, and when deaths happened they were handled within the home; family members saw to the final care of their loved ones' remains.   Death is  now shoved away into the recesses of our minds, hidden until a serious sickness or a sudden accident forces it into the light. Doughty argues that this is psychologically and socially unhealthy: not only is contemporary society obsessed with youth, but it fights death to the point of making itself miserable. Although we continue to defer death,  Our triumphs in modern medicine have produced a bitter victory: as societies become more proportionally populated by aging citizens,   we're left with a question:  where are the adults who will be taking care of these rising aged?  The numbers of geriatric physicians are falling, even as the need increases.   On a more practical level,  people's refusal to consider death means that when it happens,   few families are prepared for it, financially or otherwise.. Few can distinguish between what is legally necessary and what the funeral home recommends, and are cajoled into accepting burdensome fiscal obligations.

When Caitlin began working in a crematory,  it was a way to make money and face her fears. What it became, however, was a vocation, as she realized she wanted to help people manage death better.  Not only did she want to educate people about what happened to their bodies after death, but she wants to open eyes to the possibility of making death a meaningful part of life again.  It isn't necessary to eject people from their loved one's homes as soon as they perish, or pickle them and entomb them in vaults that seal them off from decay,   the author argues. The family can and should be part of the burial process; Caitlin's own funeral home now offers families the option to wash and dress the deceased themselves, as well as push the button that begins the cremation, which serves as a powerful moment of closure. She also explores the concept of green burials, which return allow human remains to be reclaimed by nature quickly and purposely.

I cannot recall how I stumbled on Doughty's YouTube channel ("Ask a Mortician").   which made me aware of this book, but I'm glad I did. Although it's often funny, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is a work of tender reflection on the most haunting aspect of the human experience.  It's definitely one worth reading.

Related:
Love and Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, F. Forrester Church
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach

The Job

The Job: True Tales from a New York City Cop
© 2015 Steve Osborn
272 pages

Steve Osborn grew up by his father's side in a bar, standing on boxes to play pinball and idolizing the men his father hung out with. They were all cops, and their lurid stories of policing the City's streets captivated him. He knew that's what he wanted to do -- and at some point in the early eighties, he became a patrolman in New York City, and started collecting stories of his own. The Job shares some twenty-odd tales of life on the beat, starting from his first rookie patrol to his last takedown.  Although these stories are shared for their entertainment value, they're not uniformly comic;  instead, we see a young adrenaline junkie maturing into a tough beat cop, whose emotional walls are sometimes broken by events like 9/11,

The Osborn evidenced here is a natural beat cop; he has no desire to be a detective, rise as an administrator, or work for something like the FBI;  his happy place is the city street,  where he can mingle with people and watch them, and 'collar' the ones that prey on their fellow New Yorkers.  I referred to Osborn as adrenaline junkie before, because he loves chasing down suspects, and his enthusiasm is such that in his early years they led him to doing really dumb things, like following a robber into the subway tunnels.  When he'd gotten far enough in be stuck, and felt a train approaching from behind him, he could only think that this was a stupid, stupid way to die and that from now on, he'd be the morbid example used in Track Safety classes.  Osborn's passion for the job, and for his home city in particular, allowed him to flourish as an officer and truly connect with his partners,  some perpetrators, and citizens themselves.

Although throughout the book Osborn established himself as a world-weary cop,  forever scanning and processing the people and places around him for trouble,  using dark humor to cope with the horror and uncertainty that his occupation makes him face every day,  a few stories show another side.  Early on, for instance, he's assigned to investigate a foul odor in an apartment -- but runs into a problem when he learns that that the foul odor is most definitely a body, and the deceased's parents are waiting outside the apartment demanding to see their child one last time.    The young lady has at this point been dead for days,  and decaying in a stifling-hot July apartment.  Knowing he could not allow the woman's mother to see the ghastly remains, the putrefied blob of something that was human,  Osborn finds some source of inner strength that allows him to take a knee and convince the sobbing, desperate woman that she doesn't want to see her daughter this way.   It's one of the first times Osborn realizes his job was about taking care of people, not just chasing bad guys.     Another break in the tough-guy wall comes shortly after 9/11, when -- scarfing down McDonalds during a multiday shift pulling out bodies from the rubble --  Osborn discovers a card made of construction paper tucked into the bag. Somehow, schools across the country had gotten their kids to make "thinking of you" cards for fire&police officers, and place them in the meals being given out to first responders. The realization that New York is not alone, that people across the nation are thinking and standing with them, almost makes the grizzled lieutenant cry in public.

Page for page, 400 Things Cops Know* is more informative about the way police officers notice and interpret the world, but The Job humanizes an occupation and an institution (the NYPD) that is  being increasingly villanized.   While Osborn doesn't comment on this directly, he does include stories of being attacked by mobs just for making arrests on the streets, and presumably his sympathies are with the officers.



*I read 400 Things last year, but did so over the course of several months, reading a few chapters at a time when visiting a local Books a Million and drinking coffee. Because I kept skipping around, I'm not sure I read it in its entirety.

Mean Streets

Mean Streets: Confessions of a Nightime Taxi Driver
© 2002 Peter McSherry
256 pages

Mean Streets takes readers into the dark side of Canada, or at least the dark side of Toronto. Ever since the 1970s, Peter McSherry has been driving the night shift at various cab companies,  writing about the strange people and stories the night produces along the way. In this volume many columns he's submitted to taxi publications are collected and organized in particular categories --  his experiences with drug dealers, prostitutes, and criminals on the lam, for instance, or the shady practices of tax firms -- spanning his time driving. McSherry isn't simply witness to many of these stories, but an unwilling participant in them; he is often threatened or solicited, and in his younger days was known to give chase to people who tried to stiff him on the cab fare.  Being far removed from Canada, I tend to imagine it as a bland, safe sort of place, nice to visit but not that exciting. McSherry's account certainly presents a different picture! His Toronto is just as grimy and unruly as New York City. with affair after affair recorded here that are worthy of depiction on COPS.   I didn't realize Canada, or at least Toronto, had the sort of racial strife that still besets the United States, though its came from Britain's colonial heritage, rather like France's does today.  Driving a cab was an education for McSherry, too;  originally an idealist who went to school to teach children and believed the best in everyone,  his experiences being cheated by bosses, customers, and city officials alike definitely create a world weariness.  With that, though, comes a genial tolerance both of people's failings (including his own), though he's definitely no pushover.   He readily ignores teenagers, drunks, pushy pimps, and others on the street who bitter experience has taught him are more trouble as fares than they're worth -- and if push comes to shove, he's as ready with a right cross as he is with a kind word. (Melissa Plaut, in her Hack, also learned to discriminate against teenagers, though she felt bad about it.)

Those interested in learning about the business practices of cab companies won't find too much here beyond the 1970s,  but the memoir has the usual appeal to those who like "a day in the life"  tales or true crime stories.  I noticed that McSherry prefers to drive as an independent contractor, just like Melissa in Hack;  this allows himself and other drivers to work as much or as little as they choose to, depending on their circumstances.

McSherry is, at least of 2014, still writing about driving even as he hits 70.

Related:

• Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About my Life and Started Driving a Cab, Melissa Plaut
• Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cab Driver, Graham Russell Gao Hodges

Danger Heavy Goods

Danger Heavy Goods: Driving the Toughest, Most Dangerous Roads in the World
Also known as: Juggernaut: Trucking to Saudi Arabia
© 1988 Robert Hutchinson
288 pages

"Makes Smokey and the Bandit Look Like Smokey and the Boy Scouts"

When is a lorry not a lorry? When it's leaving the country, according to the British drivers here. A continental trip makes a lorry a bonafide truck, and the run covered here puts even American transcontinental trips to shame. In Danger: Heavy Goods,  Robert Author recalls a run from England to Saudi Arabia he participated in in the early 1980s, at a time when Arabian ports were so overcrowded that ships sat at sea for weeks waiting for their turn to unload.  He takes readers through a string of countries which no longer exist, across the Bosporus Bridge, and down to Ar'ar by way of  Iraq -- which is invading Iran. Well, golly.

Where to start with this book?  It is a snapshot of Europe in the early 1980s, where Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the DDR were still destinations and  Gorbachev is trying to reform the Soviet Union by banning alcohol. It is a road trip of epic proportions and epic aggravation. Time and again the drivers that Hutchinson partnered predict that the middle east run is doomed. The pre-EU customs inspections of Europe -- the frequent scrutiny of their records, the endless paperwork -- was bad enough, but the middle east is a bonafide nightmare. From Turkey to Saudi Arabia, every official from customs agents to parking attendants wants their cut,  a little bit to grease the palm The preferred bribe is cigarettes, and every country has its most-favored denomination: Turkey is Marlboro country,  Syria swears by Gitanes, and Rothmans rule in Saudi Arabia.   Bureaucratic delays are endless, some of them lasting as long as a week, and once the cigarettes are exhausted anything else is up for grabs. English newspapers, catalogs, canned food?  The amount of aggravation drivers throughout Eurasia receive at the hands of customs officials in Iraq and Saudi Arabia  amaze the author: it's like they don't want goods.

If one can get by the customs agents without being arrested for mysterious circumstances, there's still everything else to contend with. Take your pick -- roads that turn into bobsled runs as soon as they're wet,  or threaten to throw trucks into rig-destroying quagmire if they stray from the beaten path. And which is more dangerous, Turkish prostitutes or the fact that Iran and Iraq are bombing one another? Tough call.  There are plenty of surprises which far friendlier, though. Although drivers on the mid-east run are technically in competition with one another, there's a mild level of camaraderie in the face of a common enemy, customs. In one chapter, the British drivers warn a drunken Turk of a heavy police presence despite Turks being the main rival of British firms for transeuropean traffic. (They warn him in German, while in Czechoslovakia.  German is also used as a go-between language in Ar'ar,  Saudi Arabia.)

Danger is a most interesting 'memoir', delivered by a guide who has an honest interest in every country he visits, frequently regaling readers with historical background on the places he and his coworkers are passing through in their two trucks.  Virtually every aspect of the run has been overtaken by history, though. I haven't been able to find any stats on truck traffic to Saudi Arabia from western Europe, but with a few decades of oil money sunk into the ports I doubt it's as thick as it was when featured here

Related:
Truck this For a Living: Tales of a UK Lorry Driver, Gary Mottram

Truck This For A Living

Truck This for a Living: Tales of a UK Lorry Driver
© 2014  Gary Mottram
226 pages

After hand-manufacturing woodwind instruments for thirteen years, Gary Mottram was laid off. So naturally, he took up driving. Working through a temp agency, he delivered all manner of loads via vans and small trucks before trying for Class 2 and Class 1 licenses. Truck This for a Living  collects stories from his workdays as he took on ever-more ambitious jobs. Beginning as a lowly delivery man who has to schlep around boxes and do his own unloading, Mottram eventually hits the big-time: hauling containers and then cozying up with a DVD while other guys take over.  

While this is a self-published memoir, the writing is very serviceable and even includes little illustrations to convey the difficulties inherent in squeezing a trailer with a mind of its own into a tight spot.  Having grown up among drivers -- my father and uncle -- I'm fairly familiar with American trucking and was most curious about driving in the United Kingdom and Europe. As it happens, Mottram never quite makes it to Europe -- a buddy of his gets that gig --  but I still picked up a wealth of British trucking lingo. At first  I thought an "artic" might be a refrigerated trailer, but it proved to be short for 'articulated', or a tractor-trailer.   All of the vehicles Mottram mentions were cabovers, like that on the cover. That was a change, as the only time I ever see those on American roads are buses or Isuzu daycabs. Mottram is definitely unlike any truck driver I've met, constantly fretting about the environment and  holding fast to a vegetarian diet. He carries a little pot with him and cooks on the road! From the faint horror he had for most of his fellow drivers, I'm going to guess Mottram is atypical in the UK as well.  I'm waiting for a similar book in the post, memoirs from a driver who has worked in both Britain and across Europe. 

Related:

• Pedal to the Metal: The Work Lives of Truckers, Larence Ouelett
• Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee

Taxi!

Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver
©  2007 Graham Russell Gao Hodges
225 pages

No film set in New York City is complete without scenes of Manhattan traffic, dense with yellow cars -- the patrolling ranks of the cabs, shuttling a third of the city hither and yon.  Taxi! is exactly as it describes itself, a social history of New York cabbing.  The author begins in the early days of the automobile and moves forward to 2001.  Much of it is predictable but as-yet unexplored, the tale of cabdrivers' woes throughout the economic turbulence of the 20th century, their struggling to make ends meet against declining social status.  The author has a keen interest in unionization, devoting an entire chapter to it and touching on it several other times.   He sees a failure to successfully unionize as part of static or declining fortunes among cab drivers, although the failure is less political than structural. Cabs are not factories, and the abundance of independent owner-operators sapped what strength was found in bringing together the drivers for the large taxi fleets.  When economic pressures prompted the fleets to reduce their men to independent contractors, the attraction of cab-driving was further diminished as a career, and it became more the occupation of those looking for part-time work, or (in the case of immigrants) for any entrance into the American economy.  That grim economic trend is slightly offset by the author's continued examination of cab drivers in popular media, from the first days of film on. Who knew Babe Ruth once did a cameo in a taxi film?   The films tend to portray cab drivers as lonely commentators on the social scene, and sometimes shed light on cabbys' interesting connections with the criminal world.  In the roaring twenties and the Depression, cabbies sometimes earned extra money by connecting interested passengers to prostitutes and liquor.  The contentious relationship between cabs and cops that Melissa Plaut commented on in her Hack evidently has a long history, though where it begins is a chicken and egg quandary.  Taxi! is  quick read, dry in parts but largely informative and entertaining on the whole, aided by the author's latent passion for a job he once undertook himself.

Related:
Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab, Melissa Plaut

Picking Up

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City
© 2014 Robin Nagle
304 pages

When young Robin Nagle stumbled upon a communal dumpsite in the middle of an otherwise picturesque meadow, she was astounded by the thoughtlessness of her fellow campers. Who did they think would take care of their rubbish, the  garbage fairy?  People rarely give thought to their garbage service, unless it hiccoughs, but sanitation workers are arguably more indispensable than police or firemen.  Given individuals can get by for decades without calling for fire or police services, but try going decades without the garbage man. Sure, if you have a suitable vehicle you can haul your own bags to the dump, but how do you feel about living in everyone else's rubbish?  A city like New York, a hive of millions of souls, would choke within days were it not for an efficient army of men and women in white trucks and olive uniforms hauling their refuse away.In Picking Up, Ms. Nagle joins those men, delivering stories and an inside look at a sanitation department working overdrive in New York City with unexpected humor.

Garbagemen are, despite the lack of a caste  system in the United States, our untouchables. We pretend not to notice these men and women whose job it is to take care of that which we have decided is beneath our attention. Certain aspects of their work can't fail but be noticed: garbage haulers and mechanical sweepers are work trucks, loud and odoriferous, and their working environment places them in the middle of every aspect of urban life.  The men and women themselves, however, are overlooked, unless they're being held as the subject of derision.  Ms. Nagle's time spent with the department -- first as an anthropology student, then as an actual worker --  looks at san-men square in the face. Through the details of their lives, Nagle teaches readers the ins and outs of keeping city streets clean.

Nagle begins with a brief history of garbage collection in New York, moving forward to present day municipal waste services. There are distinct operations;  the most prized work is picking up actual bags of trash, preferably dumped in one massive pile called a flat.  This is heavy and sometimes dangerous work, depending on what is being disposed, but it pays well.  Crews assigned to travel down a street dumping its public waste baskets into the truck face far more tedious hours, and street sweepers present their own challenge.  This work is constant;  sanitation never sleep, operating two shifts, and on some streets the the job is never done. As soon as a collection truck has finished its route, so many pedestrians have thrown their fast-food rubbish into the bins that they're already full and the truck makes the round again, like a very smelly bus stop.   In the winter, sanitation workers assume a second job -- clearing the streets after every snowfall.   Keeping the New York economy running on ice-free streets is such a demanding task that some DSNY planners regard plowing or preparing for plowing their first duty, with rubbish-hauling merely something to occupy time with during the summer.    What doesn't change with the seasons is the danger: sanitation work is the fourth-deadliest in the United States, behind airline piloting, logging, and commercial fishing. Spending eight to twelve hours working on city streets alive with traffic exposes sanitation workers to being mowed down by cars, and their crushing equipment is a peril to their limbs if not life.

Picking Up makes for fascinating reading; it's not so much about trash as the men who take care of it. Nagle's journey always stops at the transfer station; what happens to it after that, who else is involved in making it go "away", is not her concern.  This is a study of men (and a few stray women) at work, constantly keeping the commercial machinery of the City from  being clogged by its own refuse. It ventures to muse on waste and consumerism, slightly, but sticks mostly to regaling the reader with the diverse day to day experiences of the sanitation department -- navigating traffic in massive trucks, manhandling bag after bag of mysterious waste, dealing with unions, government bureaucracies, a distant city government, and a hostile if not dismissive public -- and how the men adapt.


Related:
Gone Tomorrow; Garbage Land.  What happens to trash after the transfer station.
Hack, Melissa Plaut.  Another account of driving/working in New York.
Pedal to the Medal,  a truck-driver turned sociologist's similar treatment of truck drivers

Hack

Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to do with my Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab
© 2008 Melissa Plaut
256 pages

At the age of twenty-nine, Melissa Plaut was let go from her job at an ad agency. She found the layoff liberating instead of terrifying, freeing her as it did from a safe but utterly meaningless job where she felt distinctly like a sell-out. Having spent most of her twenties spinning her wheels at one safe job or another, she opted this time to pursue adventure.   So it was that she braved the labyrinth of New York bureaucracy and the warren of traffic to become a New York City cabbie.Hack collects stories from her blog about working the city streets, and as they are arranged she becomes progressively more miserable, eventually downshifting to the point that driving the cab is a part-time hobby instead of a career.

Although her stories behind the wheel constitute the bulk of the book (the exception being frequent breaks to chat about her social life) there is not a lot of revealed about the inner workings of taxi services in general. A combination of customer service, chronic traffic jams, and steady physical deterioration, taxi driving quickly loses its allure and becomes a daily grind for her. Working with the public at large is not for the faint of heart, and quickly takes an emotional toll on Plaut as she endures all kinds of abuse and contempt from her patronage. Soon she is bypassing types  (teenagers and grizzly men) who she suspects will be fare-jumpers or trouble-makers, and feeling guilty for not being as trusting and open as she once was.  Driving a cab for twelve hours a day also wrecks her physically; the human body was not meant to spend half its time sitting in an odd-shaped seat, one leg constantly working the gas or brakes and the rest comparatively inactive while the driver deals with the constant stress of traffic, hunting fares, and restraining her bladder. One of Melissa's coworkers routinely soils himself, his continence wrecked by years of trying to hold it until demand slowed down.  Being the result of only a year or so behind the wheel, not much is said about the taxi industry in general: readers get a feel for how her particular company's practices work, but that's about it. There are moments of broader import, as when she weighs whether or not to make the most of a transit strike; ultimately, sheer fatigue at trying to work at all overwhelms any thoughfulness. Most of the book consists of stories about abusive customers, pushy cops, and her social life,  rendered with ample vulgarity. As one takes in her growing frustration -- and her inability to find anything outside of work that will meet her needs for meaning or happiness -- sympathy grows, especially when she witnesses a brutal traffic accident that reminds her all too much of her own near-miss, when a car struck her as a pedestrian and she was hospitalized.

Hack is interesting, though often ugly and not particularly useful about learning the ins and outs of the taxi service. It is good exposure to the raw experiences of drivers, especially New York cabbies who find the city government nearly as hostile to them as the public.

Oil on the Brain

Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Journey to Your Tank

© 2007 Lisa Magonelli

336 pages

Every moment, oil is surging up wells, being chemically sorted in vast refineries, sloshing its way across continents in pipelines, and being dispersed throughout the country in trucks to keep over three hundred million Americans mobile. The same  miracle is effected in other nations across the globe. In Petroleum on the Brain, Lisa Margonelli begins at her local gas station and backtracks the supply line – riding with truckers, touring refineries, standing in the pit of oil exchanges,  and filling her hands with ancient dirt that hasn’t seen sunlight in millions of years at the edge of a drilling operation.  Although beginning with the American market,  Margonelli’s travels take on a geopolitical message as she scrutinizes oil’s role in the destabilization of Africa and the middle east, and looks to the future in China.   Although slightly dated (researched and written  in 2004-2005),   the majority of the book’s information remains relevant, and  is delivered in humorous style.  Petroleum brims over with personality, as Margonelli connects with lives across the globe,  and demonstrates through her travels how our lives, too, are knit together with those whose livelihood

Although gas stations are where most consumers of  gasoline/petrol enter the market, and absorb the scorn of disgruntled drivers who see the price continuing to climb,  the seemingly ubiquitous c-stations are the low men on the supply line, in control of nothing and making only a marginal profit on their gasoline during the best days. As witnessed by Margonelli as she spies fleets of trucks from different companies pulling up to the same pipelines,   gasoline sold in the United States is fairly uniform. Some companies add a detergent, but pricing varies more depending on the location and the market than the product.  Given how much oil is being produced, refined, shipped, and sold every hour, the pace of activity becomes frenetic as Margonelli travels further up the supply line, encountering harried supply dispatchers and middlemen.  Although her book is about the oil industry, it's a personal encounter with time invested in relationships on Margonelli's part. For her, the gas station owner, the driver, the genius wildcatter in Texas -- they are men and women of passion and intelligence, whose story is bound up with their profession.

Its beginnings scratch idle curiosity as to how the petroleum industry works, but Margonelli spends more time researching, her text develops broader appeal, examining the role oil plays in U.S. foreign policy.  Here the book threatens to show its age: having virtually exhausted its home reservoirs of oil, she writes that the United States has to secure new supplies across the world, and to that end has been involved in a series of wars, directly or indirectly. A chapter on Iran sees her chat with both American sailors and Iranian oilmen regarding an incident during the Iraq-Iran war, in which half the Iranian navy was sunk by an American fleet despite the United States’ official non-combatant status.  Magonelli also visits petro-states in South America and Africa, where corruption is apparently immortal;  some of the tribal warfare in sub-Saharan Africa has its roots in villages receiving unequal shares of the loot when oil companies discovered their untapped potential.   Ultimately, Magonelli believes we must look beyond petroleum, to cleaner and less volatile energy sources. In her final chapter, the story moves to China, where a then-ascendant economy was not only gobbling up goal, but dumping money into clean energy programs in the hopes of expanding China’s consumer fleet while not further destroying what little clean air remains.

The oil market has continued to evolve in the ten years since this book was originally, first doubling the highest price marked in her original next and then falling beneath it. The United States has become again (however temporarily) a net oil exporter, thanks to technological advices that make extracting oil in harder to reach places easier.  Oil's votility underscores its continuing importance to the world economy and political dramas;  in the middle east, the swinish mob that is ISIS finances itself  partially through the oil market.  Given that oil won't be bowing out to competition anytime soon, learning its cost and vagaries is utterly helpful for citizens of any country, and Magonelli's account offers entertainment value to boot. 

Related:

• Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee
• Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet,  Michael Klare
• Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese

Pedal to the Metal

Petal to the Metal: The Work Lives of Truckers
© 1994 Lawrence Ouelett
247 pages

ICC is a-checkin' on down the line
I'm a little overweight, and my logbook's way behind

But nothin' bothers me tonight, I can dodge all the scales all right

Six days on the road, and I'm gonna make it home tonight. 
("Six Days on the Road", Dave Dudley)


Whatever images spring to mind at the mention of “sociology professor”, that of a long-haired truck driver probably isn’t one of them. Yet Lawrence Ouellet was, before becoming an academic,  a genuine working man – a soldier, a telephone lineman, and most notably a trucker. In Pedal to the Metal, two of his dissimilar passions meet. Drawing on his experience at three different small contractors, and referencing a range of social theorists including Thorstein Veblen,   the book not only delivers a sense of what it is like to be truck driver, but explores the truckers’ motives in connection with deeper economic principles.  Ouellet takes readers on a ridealong at each subject company, sharing both his and his coworkers’ experiences and thoughts about their work, detailing  the job’s particularities.

 The book develops toward a section on the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic awards, with Ouellet concluding that different aspects of the work appeal to different men. Those who are merely workers – men who exchange their time for money and take little pleasure in the job itself –  don’t mind routine and value jobs mostly for comfortable pay.   On the other end of the scale are ‘super truckers’ who are primarily attracted to the job because of mythic appeal; they enjoy playing the part of the outlaw, the rugged man who dominates a vast machine and spends his days trekking across the country,  tackling mountains and evading the law.  These men prefer to work at companies where destinations are highly variable, allowing for constant challenges that demand the best rigs money can buy – and who often express their pride in what they do by sinking their own money into customizing trucks further.   Ouellet sees most truck drivers as being attracted to the work because of its mystique, though over time they drift toward the conventional because of the demands of family. No young father wants his glimpses of his children to be limited to once-a-month layovers.  Trucking as a lifestyle defies the tendencies of capitalisim (in the author’s view) to reduce men to mere economic units.It’s a criticism shared in spirit by Wendell Berry, who scorns ‘employees’ – men with no real connection to the work beyond pay. Ouelett’s is certainly no mere prole, for near the book’s end he recounts the pains and glories of trucking with passion that makes plain his genuine love for it.

Pedal to the Metal has much to recommend it for anyone remotely interested in trucking, both as a career choice and as one of the most important elements of all economies regardless of scale.  It certainly has no rival in giving readers both insight into the everyday work, coupled with a study of sociological probing into the values of the men attracted to it. Its only real disadvantage is its publication date; based on research done in the 1970s and 1980s,  modern truckers work under far more technological scrutiny and regulatory restraint. Men who pride themselves on taking a load of petroleum up and down mountains without incident, who through experience gain the wisdom to choose superior routes, are now reduced to being monitored constantly, their location and speed within a search query’s tap by the home office.  The men in this study who despised the notion of being company men, of allowing the boss to get the better of them, would no doubt chafe under the constant eye of conditions today -. Trucking may yet one day be the sole domain of “company men”, shuttling back and forth on preset routes, and taking little pleasure from operating under the steady LED eyes of the machine. If nothing else, Pedal  will bring back to mind the days when truckers were truly cowboys of the highway.

Uncommon Carriers

Uncommon Carriers
© 2006 John McPhee
256 pages

Uncommon Carriers invites readers to spend a day in the life of a truck drivers, ocean-going cargo ship and riverbound freight tugboat pilots, train engineers, UPS aviators, and -- just for good measure -- pleasure-canoers sailing the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  Aside from the odd inclusion of his retracing Henry David Thoreau's oar-beats, the work is part human interest and part-inside look into the transportation service that keeps the world of goods going round. Some sections are more useful to the latter end than others; his chapter on cargo ship pilots takes place at a training school off the coast of France, and communicates the difficulty of moving across something that has a mind of its own, but nothing about the business of commercial freight.  The chapters on river freight and UPS  more conducive to understanding the ins and outs of the industry.  What Uncommon Carriers offers besides that is the personal aspect of these jobs. McPhee's research is all first-hand: he shares the lives of the men who do these jobs, befriending some and enduring the teasing of others. He's especially fond of the truck driver who carries a chemistry book to help him wash his rig, judges truck stops on whether they carry his beloved Wall Street Journal, and who moonlights as a wordsmith. The account is peppered with many lively characters like him. On whole, this was quite an interesting peek into a world we depend on so much.

Related:
Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes On Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food On Your Plate. Rose George

Nickle and Dimed

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
© 2001 Barbara Ehrenreich
221 pages

In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich asked her editor at Harpers Weekly a question for which neither had an answer: how do people get by on the meager wages available to the unskilled? To find out, Barbara reinvented herself as "Barb", a recently divorced homemaker with no work experience. Leaving her world of comfort and ease behind her, 'Barb' moved around the country, from Florida to Maine to Minneapolis, looking for the best work and cheapest rents available in a given area -- and attempting to make ends meet. She found out that 'unskilled' labor is anything but, for every job required a different set of physical, mental, and social skills, some so demanding as to be overwhelming -- especially after she was forced to take on second jobs just to break even. For despite the sneering retorts of politicans eager to dismantle social programs, simply finding a job isn't the answer to poverty -- the cost of living is so high that one job often isn't even enough to survive on, let alone serve as a foundation for fiscal success. Further, in her time spent in the trenches, Ehrenreich realized the conventional argument of these politicians is utterly reversed from reality. Far from those on welfare living off the work of others,  those who are comfortable maintain that existence only because of the treatment the working poor stoically endure,  doing jobs that no one appreciates but everyone demands, and receiving nothing -- not even a sense of security -- for their efforts. Ehrenreich's insights would have been damning in 1998: today, in a worsened situation, they demand reading.

Barb begins her existance in Florida, as a waitress. The experience is  a baptism by fire; introducing her to both impossible customers and hostile low-level managers, who seem to be paid just to ensure that the staff are miserable. She soon looks for additional work on the housekeeping staff of a local hotel, but the stress of two jobs proves more than she can take and soon 'Barb' makes her first move -- this time, to Maine, where she works as a maid, and later moves again to Minnesota to experience life as a Wal-Mart associate. While waitressing, cleaning, and sales are her primary occupations in these experienments,  invariably she has to look for supplemental work to meet her expenses, usually a part time job like the weekend gig she took in a nursing home, serving food and providing entertainment for a ward of patients with dementia.  Taking on a second job doesn't necessarily solve her problems: in fact, she usually decides to try another state soon after beginning a second job and realizing it's too much. Not only can she often not take the stress of two jobs -- of having to scurry from one to the other without a break in between -- but taking on a second job often adds additional financial burdens. While her first job might have been chosen for its relative proximity to cheap housing, the second is usually more distant, consuming more of her time and forcing more dependence on transportation.  Even when Barb pulls ahead, it's by so meager a count that the smallest disaster threatens to destroy her standing completely. Try accounting for a trip to the doctor or replacing a car part with $8.  Sadly, this is not hypothetical; while working as a maid, Barb witnesses one of her coworkers hobbling around on a bad ankle because she can't afford to lose a day of pay, let alone spend money at a physician's office.

There's voyeuristic appeal in Nickle and Dimed, but Ehrenreich combines a narrative of her experience with serious analysis,  picking apart the hiring, working, and living conditions, and pointing out that as strapped for time and cash as she is, "Barb" is getting off easy. Unlike her coworkers, she isn't trying to raise a family on these meager wages...and unlike them, her body hasn't been broken by a lifetime of motonous, labor-intensive work. Ehrenreich writes that if it is possible for her to pass as a fake, if productive, member of the working class, it is only thanks to a lifetime of above-average nutrition and plenty of time spent at the gym. Her coworkers make the most of what they can in a desperate situation -- attempting to survive on lunches of hot dog buns and nothing else, or living together to pool resources.

They shouldn't have to. The United States has been a fantastically wealthy country throughout most of the 20th century, and that conditions like this exist is outrageous -- an insult to what we are capable of. Although Ehrenreich's account dramatically establishes that the conditions of the working class which exist are unconscionable, she doesn't evaluate what went wrong or what can be done to change this. Her own experience does hint at part of the problem, though, the decentralization of American cities. The rents she can afford are generally far from the places which are hiring...and with no mass transit system in place, and with sprawl so extensive as to defy attempts to build such a system, she's forced to drive. In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay called this 'the geography of inequity'. Ehrenreich is alarmed at the prospect of $2/gallon gas, less than half of today's prices.

Nickle and Dimed must be read by Americans, because the problems Ehrenreich witnessed are still here and are more pronounced.  Witness the results of the National Low Income Housing Coalition's reports on the affordability of rent on a minimum-wage salary. Today, to afford a two-bedroom apartment on the minimum wage in Maine and Florida, "Barb" would have to work 81 and 97 hours respectively. Working two full-time jobs, "Barb" wouldn't make quite enough to pay rent -- let alone groceries, bills, transportation, or anything else. While 'Barb' doesn't  need a two-bedroom apartment, consider that two adults with kids would have the same problem. Even if both were fully employed, they couldn't afford rent -- or anything else, including daycare. Resolving this crisis will probably take work on both ends. Although the minimum wage should adjusted to be a living wage, more fundamentally the United States has to change to become a more livable nation. The zoning laws which prohibit mixed-used architecture -- a traditional source of cheap apartments -- need to be taken off the books. In addition to promoting sprawl, they have destroyed the ability of the poor to live recently. It is no accident that Transportation for America, a group advocating for a transportation system that can not only be paid for, but be used effectively by everyone, advocates for the restoration of mixed-used planning.

If only to convince you that a problem exists, this is a must read.The working class didn't create the miserable conditions they are stuck in, and no one should be forced to endure them.  I would also recommend the books in the related section.

Related:

• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay
• Transportation for America's Route to Reform
• Out of Reach 2012: America's Forgotten Housing Crisis 
• Suburban Nation, Andres Duany et. al

50 Jobs in 50 States

50 Jobs in 50 States: One Man's Journey of Discovery Across America
© 2011 Daniel Seddiqui
275 pages

Disclaimer: I read from an advanced review copy of the book, available through NetGalleys. No compensation for a review, good or negative, was offered or requested, aside from my own potential enjoyment of the book.


Frustrated and crushed by scores of failed job interviews, author Daniel Seddiqui felt like an utter loser. After breaking down in the parking lot of his local Macy's -- after returning the suit he bought for one such interview -- this athlete-turned-volunteer coach decided to pursue a dream, to 'live the map' of America by travelling throughout the continent and working a job in every state. With the support of his pseudo-girlfriend Sasha and a network of family and friends throughout the country, Daniel hid the road, determined to experience each state's most signature job for a week.

The trip starts out fairly mundane -- preparing care packages in a Mormon humanitarian office -- but future states bring more sensational opportunities, like serving stock cars at the Indy 500, serving drinks during New Orleans' Mardi Gras, and giving Hawaiian tourists surfing lessons. North America's wealth in natural resources creates a wide variety of jobs, and Seddiqui seems to have gotten his hands dirty by engaging in most of them -- meatpacking, farming,  mining, and logging all feature.  Aside from a streak of agricultural jobs (broken when he decides to sell real estate in Idaho instead of farming potatoes),  Seddiqui is able to find vastly different work every week: at one point, he transitions from modeling in North Carolina to coal mining in West Virginia.  His effort to find every state's most culturally significant job is generally successful (cheese-making in Wisconsin, working with automobiles in Michigan), though there are surprises along the way. Seddiqui sometimes chose jobs slightly off the mark out of necessity (Sorry, Daniel, you can't show up at Fenway Park and play for the Red Sox), but most of his fifty choices seemed appropriate. There's overlap between his and Stephen Fry's choices:  when the British journalist visited each of the U.S.'s fifty states, he sometimes participated in that state's most prominent job: both men realized that lobstering in Maine is far beyond their endurance level, both descend into West Virginia's coal mines, and both participated in political rallies in New Hampshire (Seddequi makes "Obama Cares" posters and manages to slip a complimentary note to the president without being tackled and manhandled by the Secret Service, quite a feat given his partial Afghan heritage that had him mistaken as an illegal immigrant while in Arizona).

Seddequi's account is certainly readable: I read the book in a single sitting, and found him generally pleasant traveling companion. His tone is informal and conversational, perhaps overly so --for at times he makes comments about people that seem inappropriate in this context. His deteriorating relationship with Sasha (which ends for good when he is in Arkansas doing excavation work and heartily agrees with graffiti that reads "Sasha Sucks") gives the reader an idea of his emotional difficulties, He also makes comments about the girls he tries to date while on the road, which strikes me as entirely out of place.  Aside from this, however, he was an agreeable host. While the book ends with a brief chapter about lessons he learned on the road and appears to be targeted as inspirational, I enjoyed it more for the occupational accounts. I learned much about some of the best and worst jobs in the United States, and his tales of on-the-road hospitality are heartening.

50 Jobs in 50 States will be available from Berrett-Koehler on 15 March 2011.

Related:

• Fifty Jobs, the book's official website.
• "Living the Map", the author's website -- a name he trademarked while working as an incorporation specialist in Delaware.
• Stephen Fry in America, Stephen Fry

Waiter Rant

Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip -- Confessions of a Cynical Waiter

© 2008 "The Waiter"

302 pages

While browsing humor site NotAlwaysRight, in which the malevolence and stupidity of the average consumer are celebrated through submitted quotations, I noticed a link in the sidebar to this book, which is based off an older blog of the same name (old enough for me to have read it years ago). I was pleased to find that my library had access to it. I decided to read this immediately following A Murder on the Appian Way (instead of finishing Taming the Mind) for the benefit of a friend, who spotted it and was immediately hooked after he read the introduction in the few minutes we had before a class started.

As you might guess from its title, Waiter Rant consists of stories told by an experienced waiter who has worked in a couple of restaurants for nearly a decade. It reminded me much of the NPR show This American Life, where every episode consists of first-person stories about a theme. Although I've listened to TAL for years, I approach every episode cautiously: it's a poignant show, a very human show. When it's funny, it's tear-inducing, gasping for air funny. And when it's sad, disturbing, or maddening, it hits the same way. There's no hint of manufactured comedy or tragedy in either This American Life or Waiter Rant, making both the comedy, tragedy, and otherwise more powerful. Although this is a very funny book, sometimes the humor is bitter, and it's always served with thought-provoking musings by the Waiter.

Our host -- not to be confused with his occupation of waiter, peon, and quasi-manager -- recounts the near-decade he spent working in two restaurants of varying quality, although neither of them seem like very pleasant places to work. Although some of the chapters are straightforward story-telling, most chapters consist of stories told about a given theme -- the narrator recounting them to himself in thought as he is involved in something similar. For instance, in "The Back Alley of Influence", he muses on the hidden side of restaurant life: just as customers will never see the back door of the restaurant with its overflowing dumpster, nor will they ever really realize anything about the lives the waiters live or on how much they depend on illegal immigrants.

Waiter Rant is definitely a recommendation, even if you don't make a habit of frequenting restaurants. Just be prepared for the authenticity.