In 1973 Fred Voss abandoned a PhD in English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, and went to work as a machinist in a steel-mill. This book looks back on fifty years of working on machine-shop floors up and down the West Coast - the noise and the silence, long shifts and short tempers, old-timers and pushy young machinists, profits in the boardrooms and wage-cuts on the cold shop-floor, the bravado, the boredom and the comradeship.