About this item
Breathtaking tales of climbers and hunters, runners and racers, winners and losers by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter.New York Times reporter John Branch's riveting, humane pieces about ordinary people doing extraordinary things at the edges of the sporting world have won nearly every major journalism prize. Sidecountry gathers the best of Branch's work for the first time, featuring 20 of his favorites from the more than 2,000 pieces he has published in the paper.Branch is renowned for covering the offbeat in the sporting world, from alligator hunting to wingsuit flying. Sidecountry features such classic Branch pieces, including "Snow Fall," about downhill skiers caught in an avalanche in Washington state, and "Dawn Wall," about rock climbers trying to scale Yosemite's famed El Capitan.
About the Author
I am a San Francisco-based sports reporter for The New York Times and the author of "The Last Cowboys" (W.W. Norton, 2018) , about a rodeo and ranching family struggling to build a future using old ways in the New West. A reporter without a beat, I write about a little bit of everything, from the Olympics (many times) to dog-grooming contests (once) . Most recently, I wrote a story titled "Deliverance From 27,000 Feet," about the year-long quest to bring two bodies from the high slopes of Mount Everest to be cremated in India. My goal is to write stories that surprise readers, usually nibbling in the shadows of the sports world. I received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for "Snow Fall," a story about a deadly avalanche in Washington, and was a finalist for the prize the year before for a series about hockey enforcer Derek Boogaard, the subject of my first book, "Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard" (W.W. Norton, 2014) , which became a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the ESPN/Pen Award for Literary Sports Writing. Raised in Golden, Colo., a one-time manager for Costco, I received a Master's degree in Journalism from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1996. I worked for The Gazette in Colorado Springs for several years, then became the sports columnist at the Fresno Bee before being hired by The New York Times in 2005.
