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Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home

by Stephen Starring Grant

bookshelves: currently-reading, 2026-nonfiction

Reading for the 2nd time

read in August 2026

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Mark said: " Though I peruse dust jacket blurb and testimonial praise about a book, I rarely allow that to be the influencing factor in whether or not I will ultimately read it. Indeed, I confess that the machinations of my personal, intimate book-selection algor Though I peruse dust jacket blurb and testimonial praise about a book, I rarely allow that to be the influencing factor in whether or not I will ultimately read it. Indeed, I confess that the machinations of my personal, intimate book-selection algorithm are even a mystery to me on occasion! Intuitively, I approached Stephen Starring Grant’s Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home with expectations of a lightly entertaining and episodic storytelling of the exploits of a rookie Rural Carrier Associate (RCA).

But in a very pleasant surprise, Mailman turned out to be much more! First, it is immediately clear that Grant is an accomplished writer (perhaps unsurprising, since he is a graduate of the gold-standard Iowa Writers’ Workshop). This talent fuses well with Grant’s acute powers of observation of people, places, and things. Second, Grant provides fascinating, behind-the-scenes details of the operations of the United States Postal Service (USPS). And though I have long had respect and gratefulness for the postal service, reading Mailman significantly enhanced those sentiments.

Apart from his lively, sparkling prose, Grant also shows himself to be something of a polymath. While not necessarily expert in multiple disciplines, his knowledge is impressively wide-ranging. Whether he comes by this naturally or through research for the book, it is still striking. For example, he fluently references sources such as Dante and Joseph Conrad, not to mention William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. He seems as comfortable talking about fly fishing as he does about fluid dynamics, and if you want to discuss military-grade weaponry, Grant is your man.

Grant’s stint as an RCA is driven by desperation for income and health insurance to support his wife and two daughters after he loses his high-dollar consulting job as a consumer strategist—courtesy of the COVID pandemic. The drop in income forces reliance on savings, which immediately begin to decline without replenishment. But Grant is an inveterate learner and takes delivering mail to heart. Daunted at first, and overwhelmed by the process of mail and packages entering and exiting the system, he reports that, “somewhere in those early months, change did come. I got tougher. I became capable of delivering everything that I loaded into my truck in the morning.”

His ride does indeed become wild, physically (negotiating obstacle courses of unpaved, rural terrain), practically (driving a lefthand-drive vehicle from the passenger seat!), and emotionally as he witnesses the crucial lifeline that the postal service is to many citizens. He often second-guesses the wisdom of his choices, but on his way to “finding home,” he also finds some measure of religion, purpose, and sheer, honest-to-goodness humanity demonstrated by all manner of people, the precious fuel that enables the world to keep on turning and which “perpetuates the human race more than anything else,”—yes, despite incompetent, self-interested, self-serving, and self-aggrandizing governments.

As a country, it often seems the case that we have more than our fair share of leaders, politicians, and administration officials who are utterly clueless about what public service truly means. They now have a choice in how to remedy that catastrophic shortcoming: spend a few days working in any operational area of the USPS, or…read Grant’s compelling, deeply personal, stirring story of how he became an agent of, a participant in, and a contributor to, something larger than himself! ...more "

Aug 10, 2026 05:34AM · see review