maven&meddler

When I saw the Facebook email announcing the book tour for Peter Heller’s latest literary effort, Kook, I knew I had to try and join up somewhere. Fortunately, he will be stopping at The Book Passage - one of my fav ‘must stop’ places when in Marin County.

Back in 2007, I got to know Peter when our orbits intersected relative to the search for missing aviator, Steve Fossett, and I assisted Peter on the article ‘Vanished’ for Mens Journal.

I think he’s not just a hell of a writer - there are lots of those - but he really gets in deeply (sometimes too deep, but that’s a story best kept between he and I) and passionately. It isn’t enough for Peter to simply document something so that others will know. He wants the reader to understand the story as well as he does- on a more viseral level. I think he believes that with understanding, the reader, like him, will be moved to take action or affect personal growth on some level.

Kook is the story of Peter Heller’s one-year search for adventure on the Southern California coast, from Huntington Beach down to Mexico. Kook is the derisive term for a beginner — Heller had just written a book on the deepest gorge in Tibet. Middle-aged and back home in Colorado, he weighed the virtues of staying put, living life small or lighting out, again, for the territory. He thought about commitment. When the call came to take a vacation with an old friend and learn to surf, Heller stopped weighing and flew to California. “Are we having a midlife crisis?” he asks his friend. “Definitely.” Heller rediscovers things he thought he understood: the ocean, pure effort, commitment, exhaustion, beauty. “There are two ways of moving through the world,” he explains in a philosophical moment. “Light or heavy. Swift or bogged down.” From Bolsa Chica to Rio La Laja, Heller travels light. He falls in love, with surfing, with his girlfriend, with life, again and again. “The things I love are fragile and only here for a little while,” he writes. “This is how I make a life. There is no next Thing. Just this — thud and shudder — and this.”
— Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

Kook will be no less and should be much more. I hope you’ll at least read some of Peter’s work, and it would be even better if you join us at the Book Passage on August 7, 2010 for a reading and signing. the author event begins at 4 p.m. but check with Book Passage closer to the date to confirm that.

“Gripping…a powerful memoir…about love: of a woman, of living, of the sea.”
Publisher’s Weekly, *Starred Review*

About Peter Heller

Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, and Men’s Journal.  He is an award winning adventure writer and the author of four books of literary nonfiction.  He lives in Denver.

Heller was born and raised in New York.  He attended high school in Vermont and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he became an outdoorsman and whitewater kayaker.  He traveled the world as an expedition kayaker, writing about challenging descents in the Pamirs, the Tien Shan mountains, the Caucuses, Central America and Peru.

At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop he won a Michener fellowship for his epic poem “The Psalms of Malvine.”  He has worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, logger, offshore fisherman, kayak instructor, river guide, and world class pizza deliverer.  Some of these stories can be found in Set Free in China, Sojourns on the Edge.

In the winter of 2002 he joined, on the ground team, the most ambitious whitewater expedition in history as it made its way through the treacherous Tsangpo Gorge in Eastern Tibet.  He chronicled what has been called The Last Great Adventure Prize for Outside, and in his book Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River.

The gorge—three times deeper than the Grand Canyon— is sacred to Buddhists, and is the inspiration for James Hilton’s Shangri La.  It is so deep there are tigers and leopards in the bottom and raging 25,000 foot peaks at the top, and so remote and difficult to traverse that a mythical waterfall, sought by explorers since Victorian times, was documented for the first time in 1998 by a team from National Geographic.

The book won a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, was number three on Entertainment Weekly’s “Must List” of all pop culture, and a Denver Post review ranked it “up there with any adventure writing ever written.”

 In December, 2005, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure, he joined the crew of an eco-pirate ship belonging to the radical environmental group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as it sailed to Antarctica to hunt down and disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet.

The ship is all black, sails under a jolly Roger, and two days south of Tasmania the engineers came on deck and welded a big blade called the Can Opener to the bow—a weapon designed to gut the hulls of ships.  In The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals, Heller recounts fierce gales, forty foot seas, rammings, near-sinkings, and a committed crew’s clear-eyed willingness to die to save a whale.  The book was published by Simon and Schuster’s Free Press in September, 2007.

Heller just completed his most recent his book, about surfing from California down the coast of Mexico.  Can a man drop everything in the middle of his life, pick up a surfboard and, apprenticing himself to local masters, learn to ride a big, fast wave in six months?  Can he learn to finally love and commit to someone else? The answers are in Kook: What Surfing Taught Me about Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave. It just won a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which called it a “powerful memoir…about love: of a woman, of living, of the sea.”

Heller is currently working on a book of poetry.