True Distance is a collection of essays by a long distance runner about his impressions of running on tracks and roads and hills and beaches in the Pacific Northwest and numerous other places.
Hours Dreadful and Things Strange is a personal account of the making of an American soldier. It describes in vivid detail what it was like for a recruit to go through Basic Combat Training at Fort Polk, Louisiana during the era of the Vietnam War.
As Jess and his wife Alma begin their life together in a nameless 1950s Pacific Northwest town, they unhesitatingly descend, with defiant passivity, into every major and minor pitfall that family life and bleak social conformity can offer-from adultery and petty shoplifting to being pressured by neighbors to dig a hole for a "Heritage Pole.
