Lance Richardson — True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen - With Carl Hoffman

Peter 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 Social Register--he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, co-founding The Paris Review as 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 Wildlife in America--"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.Underlying all Matthiessen's disparate pursuits was the same existential search--to find a cure for "deep restlessness." This search was most profoundly articulated in The Snow Leopard, his famous account of a 250-mile wildlife survey across the Himalayas. In True Nature, 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."Lance Richardson's first book, House of Nutter The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and named one of the notable titles of 2018 by The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, Esquire, and the American Library Association. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including a year-long residency at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont.Richardson is in conversation with Carl Hoffman, the author of five books. Savage Harvest was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a New York Times bestseller, a Washington Post notable book of the year, and has been translated into ten languages.  The Last Wild Men of Borneo was a finalist for the Edgar Awards and the Banff Mountain Adventure Book Awards.  The Lunatic Express was named one of the ten best books of the year by The Wall Street Journal.  Over three decades he has reported from some 80 countries, covering stories about technology, exploration and indigenous culture.  He is a former contributing editor at Wired and National Geographic Traveler magazines, is a regular contributor at The Washington Post Book World, and is working on his sixth book, for HarperCollins/Mariner.  He is a native of Washington, D.C.  https://politics-prose.com/book/9781524748319?ic_referral=ApQM6gW-SjZFlD7qGnoA_ZdXWZrXpra7Y58bNnNTnXowM3Ti1lAp26FTTKQAov2FFQUcge5gzQciwfS5utGueYBwxIE4X7Mtis4nP9KKAPFL6wLgcKVpwyslzRj8_4H4GTusoGA