A Second Life 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 limns 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.