Driven

"A taxi," writes Marcello Di Cintio, "is a border." Under the familiar roof light of every cab is a space both private and public: accessible to all, and yet, once the doors close, strangely intimate a space in which two strangers who might otherwise never have met share a five or fifty minute trip.

Quotidian themselves, taxis transcend everyday barriers between the wealthy and the working class, white people and people of colour, those who give direction and those who follow, those who speak and those who listen and yet, though driver and fare are close enough to reach out and touch one another, most trips are characterized by complete silence.

In a series of interviews with North American taxi drivers, their backgrounds ranging from the Iraqi National Guard, to the Westboro Baptist Church, to an arranged marriage that left one woman stranded in a foreign country, Marcello Di Cintio seeks out those missed conversations, revealing the untold lives of the people who take us where we want to go. (From Biblioasis)

Marcello Di Cintio is a writer from Toronto. His other books includeWallsandPay No Heed to the Rockets. Walls won the 2013Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Hisworkcan also be found in the International New York Times, Afarand Canadian Geographic.

Driven was named one of the best Canadian nonfiction books of 2021 by CBC Books, and was on the longlist for Canada Reads 2022.

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WhyMarcello Di Cintio wrote Driven

"I learned quickly thatthere aretwo different kinds of cabbies in Canada. There arethe ones that don't want to talk at all, and there arethe ones that don't want to stop talking. My mission was to find more of the latterand that didn't turn out to be that difficult.

"Most of the drivers I met, I found through other people.Someone knew someone who knew a driver or someone knewsomeone whose uncle was a cabbie and had lived this incredible life. I followed down every kind of thread that I could to find these men and women.

"Some didn't want to talk. These are incredibly busy people,which mademe all the more grateful for those that took the time to sit with me, often at a Tim Hortons, and lay out their life for me."

Read more in his interview with CBC Books.

Interviews withMarcello Di Cintio

Marcello Di Cintio reads from Walls

10 years ago

Duration 0:39

What the Berlin Wall fragment in Montreal signifies

The Sunday Magazine22:53The secret lives of taxi drivers

In 'Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers', Marcello Di Cintio unearths the tales of a handful of Canadian cabbies, and he hears the stories you may miss if you don't pay attention.