A Second Life: A Collected Nonfiction

Dan Gerber

ISBN 10: 0870135899 / ISBN 13: 9780870135897

Published by Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI, 2001

About this Item

Gold titles on green cloth, 256 pages plus 16 pages of introductory material. Mild stain on the back panel of the dust jacket and the base of the spine.

Seller Inventory # 018257

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Second Life: A Collected Nonfiction
• Publisher: Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870135899
• ISBN 13: 9780870135897
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

A Second Life brings together several new pieces with the best of Dan Gerber's previously published essays and magazine stories, many of which have appeared in magazines such as Outside, Playboy, Sports Afield, and Sports Illustrated. Gerber limns his experience as a professional racing driver, journalist, sailor, and fisherman with a poet's eye and a novelist's gift for narrative, believing, as he states in his introduction, that our truest lives must be imagined.
     New essays in this collection include a meditative journal on the Arctic and an in-depth interview in which Gerber discusses the relationship of his artistic life with that as an explorer of the natural world. Also included are a gripping account of his return to racing thirty-three years after his career-ending crash, a story about saving his own life in the African desert by introducing a clan of Rendili warriors to ice, a chronicle of his pursuit of the most elusive fish in the world, and the story of a clandestine sailing trip to Cuba. His classic and highly praised book on the Indianapolis 500, the World's Fastest Carnival Ride, long out of print, is included here in its entirety.
     Blending Thoreau's dictum that "a writer is a traveler who stays at home," with Wallace Stevens's that "it is the worst of all things not to live in a physical world," Dan Gerber's focus in A Second Life is the inward experience of the outer world.

About the Author

Dan Gerber was born and grew up in western Michigan and received his bachelor's degree from Michigan State University in 1962. He has worked as a corporate executive, an automobile dealer, a professional racing driver, and a high school teacher. From 1968 through 1972, with Jim Harrison, he co-edited the literary magazine Sumac. He has traveled extensively as a journalist, particularly in Africa. He has been writer-in-residence at Michigan State University and Grand Valley State College and has lectured, read, and taught at numerous colleges, universities, libraries, schools, and museums throughout the United States and England. He and his wife, Debbie, divide their year between central California and southeastern Idaho.

Dan Gerber has published three novels, a short-story collection and six books of poems, including A Last Bridge Home; New Selected Poems and Trying to Catch the Horses. He was the recipient of the Michigan Author Award in 1992, had work selected for inclusion in Best American Poetry 1999, and received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature in 2001.