Riding tubes in Venezuela. BASE jumping in Europe. Climbing big walls in Yosemite. Riding bulls in Texas. These first-person stories from John Long, while vastly different in content, share an identifiable emotional texture, tone and delivery, and fundamentally are of one piece. This is storytelling at its best—nonfiction that reads like fiction. In Stories from the Dirt, the action leaves you breathless, but it’s the characters that really leave the lasting mark. In John’s own words, “the secret sauce of this collection is that while the action rarely flags, it never leaves the people behind—like all stories worth a damn, [this collection] is all about the people.”
