{"product_id":"true-nature-the-pilgrimage-of-peter-matthiessen","title":"True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen","description":"\u003cb\u003eNAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY \u003ci\u003eTHE WASHINGTON POST - \u003c\/i\u003eThe first biography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi, whose trailblazing work championed Native American rights and helped usher in the modern environmental movement, by award-winning writer Lance Richardson. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"A stunning, formidable achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen.\" --Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Prometheus\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"A fair-minded, grippingly paced, and tremendously readable narrative.\" \u003ci\u003e--\u003c\/i\u003ePico Iyer, \u003ci\u003e \u003ci\u003eAir Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003ePeter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, achieved so much during his lifetime, in so many different areas, that people have struggled to pin him down. While ambivalent about his WASP privilege--as a teenager he demanded that his name be removed from the New York \u003ci\u003eSocial Register\u003c\/i\u003e--he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, co-founding \u003ci\u003eThe Paris Review \u003c\/i\u003eas he worked undercover for the CIA. But then, after a rebellious stint as a Long Island fisherman, he escaped into a series of wild expeditions: floating through the Amazon to recover a prehistorical fossil; embedding with a tribe in Netherlands New Guinea; swimming with sharks off the coast of Australia. His novels, inspired by his travels, were unclassifiable meditations about Caymanian turtle hunters and frontier outlaws in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, his nonfiction became legendary: nature books like \u003ci\u003eWildlife in America\u003c\/i\u003e--\"key parts of the canon of emergent environmental writing,\" says Bill McKibben--as well as advocacy journalism supporting Cesar Chavez, Leonard Peltier, and Native American land claims. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eUnderlying all Matthiessen's disparate pursuits was the same existential search--to find a cure for \"deep restlessness.\" This search was most profoundly articulated in \u003ci\u003eThe Snow Leopard\u003c\/i\u003e, his famous account of a 250-mile wildlife survey across the Himalayas. In \u003ci\u003eTrue Nature\u003c\/i\u003e, Lance Richardson reconstructs the full scope of a spiritual quest that ultimately led Matthiessen, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, to the highest ranks of Zen. Drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, Richardson depicts Matthiessen's life with page-turning immediacy, while also illuminating how the writer's uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation--to express, eloquently and presciently, that \"in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge.\"","brand":"Lance Richardson","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52958912184684,"sku":"9781524748319","price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0912\/7985\/1884\/files\/9781524748319-us.jpg?v=1764863296","url":"https:\/\/commercestreetbooks.com\/products\/true-nature-the-pilgrimage-of-peter-matthiessen","provider":"Commerce Street Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}