Mothertrucker


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.




Mother Trucker


Book Description

Sandy is a white-collar forty-five-year-old woman who finds herself in a rut. She’s tired of the life she’s been living and wants more. One night, while considering her midlife crisis, she has an epiphany and leaves everything behind to become an “over the road” truck driver. It’s not easy being a woman in a male-dominated occupation, but Sandy is lucky. She meets four other women at a night school training program. The five become fast friends and form relationships to last a lifetime. With the help of her pals and a new lease on life, Sandy discovers the passion she’d been missing. Sweet and sassy Mother Trucker is Smokey and the Bandit meets Bridesmaids and filled with comedy, emotion, and some embarrassing adventures across America. Author Missy Ryckman draws from her own life experiences in this hilarious, heartfelt book about rediscovering yourself. “Welcome to Tennessee,” the sign read, as the bus eased on down the road. Getting closer, she thought, as she shifted in her seat, closed her eyes, and tried to sleep a little more. But sleep was not so easy to come by. The sounds and smells made sure of that, and her brain absolutely would not shut off. ... After two more states, she would be there, and her training would start. Her new life would start.




Oh, It’s On, Mother Trucker!


Book Description

Sandy continues traveling America's highways as a happy, over-the-road truck driver. She commits to her company's training program with the required amount of experience under her belt. As a newly minted certified CDL instructor, Sandy finds herself in a position of enthusiasm and uncertainty as she starts her training career. Not only does she find like-minded women entering the industry with the same passion as herself, but she also finds the polar opposite. While training a new student, a sudden injury happens, forcing Sandy to question all her life decisions. Sandy ventures into a new life of uncertainty and healing.




Mother Trucker


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.




The Trucker


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.




Trucker Ghost Stories


Book Description

A collection of firsthand accounts from truckers who have driven all over the United States and have encountered strange and unusual phenomenons which can only be described as paranormal.




Hush, Little Trucker


Book Description

Soothe truck-loving toddlers off to sleep with this vehicle-themed bedtime picture book Hush, little trucker, you’re in luck. Mama’s gonna find your lost toy truck. A new spin on the classic song “Hush, Little Baby,” this truck-themed lullaby follows a mother and child as they discover different vehicles, from a bulldozer to a front-end loader. Kim Norman’s gentle rhyming text, paired with Toshiki Nakamura’s imaginative illustrations, makes this picture book a great option for bedtime read-alouds.




The Hope in Leaving


Book Description

Handsome Jack is a logger, nomad, and born dreamer. His young wife, Simone, has too many kids and never enough money to support or protect them. The family keeps on the move, shedding a grand total of twenty-seven homes. Their first child, Randy, is sensitive and brilliant and bold, protector of his younger siblings, the fearless star of their childhood adventures and misadventures—until something snaps inside him. The second child who comes a year after him, our narrator Barbara, is the lucky one, who can dream of getting out. Every time the family relocates, she feels “the hope in leaving and doing better next time.” Poverty, mental illness, sexual abuse, and injustice pursue them wherever they go. They live small-town life hard and suffer, most of all Randy. The great surprise of The Hope in Leaving isn’t that these characters descend increasingly into isolation and strife, but that despite this they remain a family, that there is always the spark of wit in their banter, and a kind of closeness no matter what happens, even a sense of normalcy. Gradually, the reader comes to understand why The Hope in Leaving is a book that had to be written. In it, Williams proves beyond doubt that there is one thing that can survive the worst of life and even death itself: love without judgment.




Made in China


Book Description

A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant's journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family's garment factory in Queens. At home, she is treated as a maid and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: she is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their new country. But instead of acquiescing, Qu alerts the Office of Children and Family Services, an act with consequences that impact the rest of her life. Nearly twenty years later, estranged from her mother and working at a Manhattan start-up, Qu requests her OCFS report. When it arrives, key details are wrong. Faced with this false narrative, and on the brink of losing her job as the once-shiny start-up collapses, Qu looks once more at her life's truths, from abandonment to an abusive family to seeking dignity and meaning in work. Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi'an to New York, Made in China is a fierce memoir unafraid to ask thorny questions about trauma and survival in immigrant families, the meaning of work, and the costs of immigration.




A Trucker's Tale


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’.