2012 Nebraska Book Award

When the salvage crew finally arrived, they found the dead man and a half-sunken sailboat overflowing with receipts, journals, letters, lists, school notes— a lifetime's accumulation of paper. Later, the woman's body would be found. Brent Spencer's father died as mysteriously as he had lived. Armed only with the soggy scraps of his father's life, Spencer began a two-thousand-mile search for the man he never really knew. Rattlesnake Daddy is about that journey— a powerful, heartfelt, and often funny meditation on the bonds that unite and the boundaries that divide all fathers and sons.