Description: Riding tubes in Venezuela. BASE jumping in Europe. Climbing big walls in Yosemite. Riding bulls in Texas. These first-person stories from acclaimed climber and adventurer John Long may be vastly different in content, but they share an identifiable emotional texture, tone a...
Brief description: John Long is an acclaimed American rock climber and author of more than forty titles, including The Trad Climber's Bible (FalconGuides). He lives in Venice, California.
Review Quotes: "John Long is a genre unto himself. Few other writers can match his lean and unpredictable prose, and this latest collection proves that he remains a shrewd witness of today's cutting-edge adventure sports." --Andrew Bisharat, climber, National Geographic writer, and editor of eveningsends.com
"John Long makes me sick--with envy, I mean. How a futuristic ultra-elite-athlete became a truly accomplished writer of literary adventure stories--delivering complex emotions and characters alongside throat-grabbing thrills--is, well, nothing short of miraculous."--Daniel Duane, Men's Journal contributing editor and author of Lighting Out: A Golden Year in Yosemite "No one spins literary adventure yarns like award-winning author John Long. In Stories From the Dirt, Long writes of his world travels, driven by discovery, a chance alignment of cosmic happenings, or by a 'curious-sounding village or tribe that nobody knew much about.' My favorite, 'Last Place on No Map, ' is a literal journey to one of Dante's rings of hell, a jungle slop hole in Brazil where '40,000 muddy men, effectively slaves, gripped by gold fever, sustained by jungle tubers and coconut juice, ' shovel and sluice the watery earth hoping to find a nugget. Most find disease and ruined lives, but Long finds a story. Then it's onward, upriver to that curious-sounding village."--Duane Raleigh, publisher, Trail Runner, Ascent, and Rock & Ice magazines