Almost every magazine piece I've ever written, I felt like I haven't done it justice, like it was just a gloss.

The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light.

I'm going to paraphrase Thoreau here... rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth.

THE LONG WALK is a raw, wrenching, blood-soaked chronicle of the human cost of war. Brian Castner, the leader of a military bomb disposal team, recounts his deployment to Iraq with unflinching candor, and in the process exposes crucial truths not only about this particular conflict, but also about war throughout history. Castner's memoir brings to mind Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front.

At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

Antarctica is a very alien environment, and you can't survive here more than minutes if you're not equipped properly and doing the right thing all the time.

My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards.