Neither Snow Nor Rain by Devin Leonard

Neither Snow Nor Rain by Devin Leonard was a really interesting book with the subtitle A History of the United States Postal Service.

In telling a compelling story about something I might not have expected to find as such, the book reminded me of the Beth Macy book Factory Man, which I wrote about in 2014, or to a lesser extent, the Tom Vanderbilt book Traffic, that I wrote about in 2008. Additionally, Leonard's work brought to mind the excellent Esquire article "Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?" by Jesse Lichtenstein.

I liked quite a bit how at both the beginning and end of Neither Snow Nor Rain, Leonard wrote about Evan Kalish, someone who visits Post Offices across the country and chronicles the travels on his blog, Going Postal. Kalish's story struck me as being very cool in having a combination of Americana and a case of some who found a thing they like and dove into it.

In terms of the historical details from the book, Leonard wrote of how in 1737, Benjamin Franklin became Postmaster of Philadelphia and then Postmaster General of America on July 4, 1776. Postal history through the years then included the crusade against immorality by Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock, air mail, rural free delivery, and private delivery services, both hundreds of years ago and in then in the 1970s via FedEx, UPS, and DHL.

Leonard wrote of how in 1947, the Post Office delivered 36 billion items, 114 billion in 1982, peaked at 213 billion in 2006 and was back down to 171 billion in 2010. This drop in volume and accompanying revenue combined with the how the Post Office must operate, with being legally required to provide universal service six days a week to every American home and business and have service costs determined by a Postal Regulatory Commission has led to the current fiscal problems suffered by the Post Office. Related to the Commission, Leonard as a Businessweek writer just did "Making No Cents" on how the cost of sending a first class letter was for some reason recently dropped two cents.

All in all, an excellent book from Leonard and anyone remotely interested in the subject would likely enjoy it quite a bit.

Esquire writing - from Lichtenstein, Chiarella & Jones

There's been a couple of Esquire pieces I've read lately that struck me as particularly remarkable, with one published in the Feb 2013 issue, one for the web last week and one a website post from 2010 that I linked to last year.

The magazine feature story was by Jesse Lichtenstein with "Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?" It's writing that's both on an important subject and incredibly detailed. In this regard of how much included and the reporting that likely had to go into it, Lichtenstein's reminded me of a piece I linked to in Sept of last year, Justin Heckert's Esquire feature "How to Build an American Car" on the 2012 Cadillac ATS.

In the Esquire writing of profundity category lately were two different pieces published on the website. Tom Chiarella wrote "The Happiness of Aaron Swartz" about doing a eulogy at the memorial of the internet pioneer and open source web advocate. The essay by Chiarella touches on the themes of achievement and fear as well as friends and family and struck me as an example of just how powerful words can be when describing something of great import.

The final Esquire piece to note here is one from a few years ago that I previously included as part of a post on writing about fathers & sons, but I came across it again recently and is great writing that also reminded me of the essay on Swartz in the depth of feeling conveyed. "Autistics" was written by Chris Jones for his Esquire blog back in Sept 2010 and is about the writer's four year old son and his diagnosis as mildly autistic. It's a short piece and just struck me as really fantastic work.