Bøger i River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize serien

In his award-winning debut essay collection, What Cannot Be Undone, Walter M. Robinson shares surprising stories of illness and medicine that do not sacrifice hard truth for easy dramatics. These true stories are filled with details of difficult days and nights in the world of high-tech medical care, and they show the ongoing struggle in making critical decisions with no good answer. This collection presents the raw moments where his expertise in medical ethics and pediatrics are put to the test. He is neither saint, nor hero, nor wizard. Robinson admits that on his best days he was merely ordinary. Yet in writing down the authentic stories of his patients, Robinson discovers what led him to the practice of medicine-and how his idealism was no match for the realities he faced in modern health care.

The past is a living thing, palpable as the weather. In this collection of essays, Kevin Honold explores themes of history and its fading significance in modern American life. With contemplations on religions, philosophies, works of literature, and the land, Honold examines what it means to be oneself within the world.

Through the author's travels, Try to Get Lost explores the quest for place that compels and defines us: the things we carry, how politics infuse geography, media's depictions of an idea of home, the reverberations of the word "hotel", and the ceaseless discovery generated by encounters with self and others on familiar and foreign ground.

Part history, part memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself taps dimensions of human yearning: the need to belong, the snarl of family history, and embracing womanhood in the patriarchal American West.

A book about ownership. It begins with an essay about being given a man's furniture while he's on trial for murder and follows with essays that question corporeal, familial, and intellectual forms of ownership. Mining her own life and those of others, Sarah Viren considers the contingencies of ownership alongside the realities of loss in this debut essay collection.

What would you be willing to do to save someone, perhaps someone you loved? On a moment's notice, for instance, would you lunge between that person and an assailant's knife strike? In that same situation, what would you be willing do for yourself? And what if there were nothing, ultimately, to be done? This book deals with these questions.

Knowing next to nothing about fishing, Rosemary McGuire signed on to the crew of the Arctic Storm in Homer, Alaska, looking for money and experience. Cold, hard work and starkly sexist harassment were what she found. Here is her story of life on a fishing boat as the only woman crew member.

The author was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian Mountains. This book tells his life story.

The environment may surround us, but when that environment is a natural wonder like Yosemite National Park, it also reaches what's inside us. For Mark Liebenow, Yosemite did just that, and did so when he needed it most. In Mountains of Light, Liebenow takes us deep into the heart of this wilderness, introducing us to its grand and subtle marvels.

A sometimes strange, sometimes lyrical, and often humorous attempt by an inveterate storyteller to recount "just things as they were"

There is no denying it: motherhood splits a woman's life forever, into a before and an after. To this doubled life Lisa Catherine Harper brings a wealth of feeling and a wry sense of humour, a will to understand the emotional and biological transformations that motherhood entails, and a narrative gift that any reader will enjoy.

Traveling between the poles of Ohio and Vermont, childhood and motherhood, the author writes of a peripatetic family whose oddities make the quirks of a Thurber household seem downright subdued; and of a thirteen-year-old son as an unlikely companion through the torments of middle-aged dating.

Reveals the promises and warnings of western boomtown life - stories of alcoholism, murder, betrayal, hope, and finally, redemption.

In 1957, Joseph Spagna and five other men waited to board a bus called the Sunnyland. Their plan was: ride the bus together - three blacks and three whites - get arrested and take their case to the US Supreme Court. This book chronicles the story of an American family against the backdrop of one of the civil rights movement's lesser-known stories.

Chronicles the author's travels in the rugged mountain forests of Japan's Shiretoko National Park, on a vision quest in Death Valley, and to the sacred waters of the Ganges. This book also features the landscape of his marriage, both its initial sweetness and its eventual failure.

""This is Hannah,"" Lynne Hugo introduces her chocolate Labrador retriever to an aged woman in a wheelchair at the Golden View Nursing Home. ""Would you like to pat her?"" ""I don't know,"" the woman responds warily. ""Dogs are complicated."" Where the Trail Grows Faint is the story of Hugo's experiences with Hannah and the elderly patients they visit.