Over more than three decades, Mark Maio documented the last years of a tough-minded gang of Great Lakes union men who called themselves Scoopers. They worked in groups of eighteen, called gangs, unloading large grain-hauling vessels from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first; the first scoopers touched the edge of American history, for many were the Irish immigrants who dug the Erie Canal. The book is about the grain shovelers and their union, the Grain Shovelers Union 109, one of the first on the Lakes, and begins with grain farmers in Kansas, following the Great Grain Route from the harvest to Duluth on Lake Superior and the Buffalo harbour at the entrance to the Erie Canal. Anthony Bannon, longest-serving director of George Eastman House, wrote an accompanying essay in six chapters. Maio’s photographs interpret the powerful dignity of labour and the strength of community: the scoopers’ shovelling deep in the holds of schooners and lake steamers, a choreography artful, dangerous and singular. “A small classic of American Studies” (Richard Blau); “Agee and Evans come to mind.”