BOOKS - Cabbie's chronicle: She's no hack
MARK DUNKELMAN, Special to the Journal

SECTION: ARTS & TRAVEL; Pg. I-07, October 16, 2007

HACK: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do with My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab, by Melissa Plaut.

Villard. 240 pages. $21.95.

Melissa Plaut was in her late twenties, stuck in a boring, dead-end office job in Manhattan, when she was laid off and had an epiphany: "I was gonna treat life as the adventure I wanted it to be." Her first step in that direction was to act on a long-submerged impulse - to become a New York City cabbie.

Hack follows Plaut through the process of obtaining her taxi license (including a three-day course and an exam), to the Crosstown Cab Company of Long Island City, and out onto the streets behind the wheel of a yellow Ford Crown Victoria. She thus becomes one of about 200 female cabbies, who together form less than one percent of the 40,000 licensed taxi drivers - most of them South Asian men - in the city.

Passengers are more surprised by Plaut's gender than her fellow cabbies, most of whom provide her with friendly advice. Full of excitement and trepidation as she embarks on her great adventure, she is gradually ground down by month after month of 12-hour shifts. Unruly, rude and fare-beating passengers, gridlocked traffic and frequent accidents, and the constant race for fares all batter Plaut with stress. By the end of the book it's unclear whether she will stick it out or turn off the meter, head back to the garage, and end her ordeal.

But the ride never becomes tedious as Plaut reels off anecdotes about amusing or annoying co-workers and fares, or the irate drivers who attack her with alarming frequency. She convinces us of the psychological and physical toll of her demanding (and occasionally demeaning) job, and at the end of her workday we feel her pleasure in washing off the city's grit, scrubbing her hands free of the filth left by money.

This book evolved from Plaut's blog. Her voice is perfect for these taxi tales: blunt, vernacular, laced with expletives, and utterly without pretense. For the ride she gives us - alternately mundane and hair-raising, hope-inspiring and horrible - she deserves a big tip. Plaut may not have found her life's direction in the front seat of a taxicab, but she has driven herself a good distance down the road to being a writer.

Mark Dunkelman is an author, Civil War historian and frequent reviewer in Providence.