True Nature

"Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a visionary writer and thinker, was a person of myriad contradictions. After his teenage demand that his name be removed from the Social Register, Matthiessen nonetheless attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, working for the CIA and founding the now famous literary magazine The Paris Review with George Plimpton; he then made his living as a fisherman on Long Island while becoming a writer, whose promising early fiction (garnering him invitations to drinks with top New York editors) soon existed alongside such works as his now-classic Wildlife in America (1959), arguably the first significant "environmental writing," before that movement and category even existed (with its damning of white colonizers, too, before that was the norm). His pursuit of spiritual and cultural understandings took him to the far-flung and diverse horizons, from his famous "Snow Leopard" journey in the Himalayas to his travels with biologists in the Serengeti, his canoeing through rapids in the Amazon in search of a Miocene-epoch fossil, his embedding with the Hadza people in Tanzania, his lifelong battle to get justice for the wrongly accused Native American prisoner Leonard Peltier. Meanwhile, Matthiessen, a sensitive champion of people's rights, was a philanderer and an inattentive father; he was an ever unsatisfied seeker yet a devoted practitioner and teacher of Zen. Episodes in this amazing life are given page-turning immediacy by the brilliant Lance Richardson, who reveals throughout the ways that Matthiessen's uncanny gifts and drive toward his subject matter allowed him to discover deeper connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation, between the Vietnam war and political corruption-to see clearly, so far ahead of his time and ours, that "in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge.""--