"The book is raw, but compassionate--ironic, but loving. It depicts humanity at its most pathetic and its most heroic, which are sometimes the same thing.
No Guns is a "Fast Car" that takes the reader on a thrill ride through sordid reality and the fantasy that humankind creates in order to endure. A tour deforce!"
from a review by
Roberta Tennant, Editor-in-Chief, Falcon Books
Hackneyed Prose
All's fare for literary taxi driver
By Kelly Vance (East Bay Express)
George Burns once observed: "It's too bad everyone who knows how to run the country is already busy cutting hair and driving taxicabs." No one really cares much about the opinions of barbers, but there's something irresistible about the world-view of a hack. Look at Travis Bickle, or Andy Kaufman (but forget about Tony Danza). Taxi drivers are widely supposed to have a permanent ringside seat for the unreported "true" main events of life, the foibles and frustrations of people trying to get the hell away from one part of town in favor of another, better one. Cabbies see hookers and johns. Cabbies see thugs, punks, slumming socialites, off-duty maids, lost tourists, drunken conventioneers, unhappy married couples, district attorneys, government witnesses, and babes in the woods. And when a hackney driver decides to spill what he or she knows, we're instantly fascinated.
One such curbside chronicler is Larry Sager, author of a new book, No Guns, No Knives, No Personal Checks: The Tales of a San Francisco Cab Driver (Everett Madison, $14.95). The Oakland resident has a résumé to baffle any corporate bean counter. According to his official bio, Sager, a classically trained musician who has also worked as a radio talk-show host and a renovator of Victorian houses, now practices law at a prestigious San Francisco law firm and teaches criminal law at UC. But in his student days at SF State in the ´90s, he drove a night shift for Yellow Cab in the city and wrote up the previous night's adventures the next day for his creative writing class. His stressful encounters are our slice of fatback: The Cat Woman, an androgynous dominatrix-type in black leather. The horny Italian tourist. AIDS patients, the sincerest people of all. The nerd who admired his pepper-spray container. The crazed, menacing bum who turned out to be another cabbie. The guy on Valencia and his bleach bottle And so on.
Sager uses the long narrative form rather than the quickie blurb, and each vignette builds. This style of episodic, picaresque observation has been done before, notably locally in the Chronicle's Night Cabbie column, a pseudonymous biweekly series of city-underbelly snapshots that ran from 1996 to 2004. Where the Night Cabbie was a working-stiff philosopher with a financial-district-gone-to-seed demeanor, Sager obviously sees himself as more of a literary light. "I was actually very freaked out at first," he e-mails about the Night Cabbie. "Here is this guy stealing my idea. Of course, every cab driver is writing a book, so whatever." Sager believes his taxi tales go deeper: "I don't simply drive a couple of tourists down Columbus and say they seemed odd. My stories are very dialogue-driven. So, in my humble opinion, my writing is better, funnier, more poignant, more interesting, and more real." You be the judge. Larry Sager reads from No Guns, No Knives ... Saturday evening (7 p.m.) at the Emeryville Barnes & Noble. Signing books with him is Shanon Essex, the book's illustrator. NoGunsNoKnives.com
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