A Second Life: A Collected Nonfiction

This book brings together 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, with several new pieces. Gerber lends 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 traveller 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 is the inward experience of the outer world.