About this item
"Every life is different, but every death is the same. We live with others. We die alone." In his riveting, artfully written memoir The Autobiography of an Execution, David Dow enraptured readers with a searing and frank exploration of his work defending inmates on death row. But when Dow's father-in-law receives his own death sentence in the form of terminal cancer, and his gentle dog Winona suffers acute liver failure, the author is forced to reconcile with death in a far more personal way, both as a son and as a father. Told through the disparate lenses of the legal battles he's spent a career fighting, and the intimate confrontations with death each family faces at home, THINGS I'VE LEARNED FROM DYING offers a poignant and lyrical account of how illness and loss can ravage a family.
About the Author
David R. Dow is the Cullen Professor at the University of Houston Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and theory, contract law, the death penalty, and law-and-literature. A graduate of Rice and Yale, Dow is also the founder of the Texas Innocence Network (TIN) , Texas' oldest innocence project, and the co-founder (with his wife, Katya) of the Juvenile and Capital Advocacy Project (JCAP) . Working through his death penalty clinic, Dow and his team of lawyers, clinical professors, students, and interns, have represented more than one hundred death row inmates during their state and federal appeals. Dow is the author of both scholarly papers and texts, as well as books for a general audience. His first memoir, The Autobiography of an Execution (published by Twelve) , was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover award for nonfiction. His second memoir, Things I've Learned From Dying (also published by Twelve) , was named by NPR as one of the best books of 2014. Confessions of an Innocent Man, Dow's first novel, was published by Dutton in 2019. Dow and his wife Katya have one son, Lincoln. They live in Houston and Durango, Colorado, along with their dogs Delano and Soul.
