Island Books will host Finn Murphy, author of “The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road,” from 6:30-8 p.m. on Aug. 21.
Murphy is driving himself around the country in his own 18-wheeler, touring in support of his new book.
“It’s a personal story, but also in many ways a political one that’s particularly resonant right now,” said James Crossley of Island Books.
Murphy is a long-haul trucker whose life experience crosses the ever-widening divide between the so-called educated elites and the working class, and his memoir has been getting excellent reviews. With readers desperate for real stories that explain how we got to where we are, electorally speaking, they’ve been turning to books like “Hillbilly Elegy” and “Long Haul” in droves, Crossley said.
Murphy grew up in Connecticut and now lives in Colorado. He started working as a long-haul trucker in 1980, after dropping out of college. In his first book, “The Long Haul,” Murphy introduces readers to the rollicking and often rocky life of the professional trucker.
He’s covered more than a million miles packing, loading and hauling people’s belongings all over America.
Known by his trucker handle “U-Turn,” he spends his days and nights in a 532-foot, 18-wheeler, which he calls Cassidy.
Murphy specializes in long-haul moving and, more specifically, high-end executive relocations — in other words, the packing, transporting and unpacking of someone’s personal loot. Long-haul movers have to traverse the world between highways, navigating suburban cul-de-sacs and one-way city streets. Murphy has to know how to back up blind-side and judge his turning radius to the millimeter.
The book exposes the “unvarnished inner workings of a select, reclusive world that most of us don’t know,” and “is filled with colorful characters and funny, poignant and often absurd situations,” according to a press release.
“He introduces us to a memorable cast of truckers, movers and clients, among them Tommy (the Vampire), Murphy’s helper in Florida who never sleeps and has a penchant for cutting limes in the shotgun seat of the moving truck; Mr. King, one of Murphy’s first clients, whose half-mile curved driveway nearly ruined him; and Mike, another driver, who may or may not have tried to kill Murphy with a 600-pound vault,” the release states.
It’ll be an event worth attending if only to see the big rig with the giant book cover on the side parked next to Island Books, Crossley said.
See www.islandbooks.com for more.
