Beyond Ophir: Confessions of an Iditarod Musher by Jim Lanier

Jim Lanier had a good life going: a great family, a successful pathologist, a sometimes singer. Then he went to the dogs, ran the Iditarod in 1979, and has never recovered. With that '79 race as the book's backbone, Jim tells its tale--entertaining, exciting, occasionally informative, and mostly the truth. From the bustle of metropolitan Anchorage to Front Street in Nome, it's no how to do. If anything, it's how not to--how not to give in to the urge to quit when the going gets tough, in life and in this metaphorical Iditarod.