The Last Taxi Driver

By: Lee Durkee

Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor

This darkly comedic novel centers around a day in the life of an exhausted middle-aged hackie who’s about to lose his job to Uber, his girlfriend to lethargy, and his ability to stand upright to chronic back spasms.

Lou - a lapsed novelist and UFO enthusiast who has returned to his home state of Mississippi after decades away - drives for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a college town among the trailer parks and housing projects. With Lou’s way of life fast vanishing, an ex-dispatcher returns to town on the lam, triggering a bedlam shift that will test Lou’s sanity and perhaps cost him his life. Against this backdrop, Lou has to keep driving and driving - even if that means aiding and abetting the host of criminal misfits haunting the back seat of his Town Car.

Written by a former cabbie, The Last Taxi Driver careens through the highways and backroads of North Mississippi as Lou becomes increasingly somnambulant and his fares increasingly eccentric.

©2020 Lee Durkee (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC

The last Taxi Driver a big hit with crowd

By Brian Lamar

Dozens of loyal fans braved the gloomy afternoon rainstorm to pile into Cat Island Coffeehouse and Bookstore March 4 to have a chance to meet author Lee Durkee during a book signing event for his long-awaited title, The Last Taxi Driver.
The books was described as a “Wild, funny, poetic fever dream that will change the way you think about America,” said the award-winning and prolific best-selling author George Saunders.
During the book signing, Durkee read the first chapter of his book, which he self-proclaimed as the only chapter suitable to be read aloud in a public space. During the reading of the first chapter, there were several moments of raucous laughter at the sarcastic and witty nature of Lou.
Lou, the protagonist of the novel, which was based on real experiences of Durkee’s own time behind the steering wheel of a cab, spent his days etching out a living in a run-down cab in and around Oxford while fighting against the fare-stealing conglomerate known as Uber. Lou fights his inner nature of being rude to customers, but loses the battle and is haunted by the fact that his 70-hour workweek eats away and his kindness toward his passengers. Near the end of the first third of the novel, Lou is stricken by shame as he shrewdly handles a woman who has lost everything.
According to Durkee, the novel is about a man who wants to be a better man but falls short. It is a tale of attempted self-improvement.
The book is Durkee’s second full-length novel separated by the publishing of his first novel twenty years ago. Due to his own admission, Durkee admitted that it was so hard to be published due to his eclectic writings of UFOs, Astral projections and other obscure obsessions.
The novel is also a thought-provoking piece that explains the plights of the “gig economy” and its perils for American workers.
The Last Taxi Driver is easy to read, funny and touches on difficult worker’s rights topics in a similar fashion to Steinbeck’s “In dubious Battle”.

I loved this book

I never leave reviews but really loved this book and having driven a cab all through college I can tell you that the author was a really taxi driver and everything in the book - including all the characters - ring true. This book also does a great job of capturing the humanity and absurdity in all of us and is often laugh out loud funny. I hope Lee puts something else out again soon.

Really just a drag

Really just a cascade of pretentious and gritty, yet annoyingly politically correct, nonsense. Waste of time.

Funny at first but spiraled down

Funny satire of colorful taxi customers. But the last three hours I skipped because it was not even a story anymore. It was more like a manic rant and was pathetic, not funny.