Two Men One River

Begin with 1918 Niagara-on-the-lake: its opulence and extravagance, the actors and the elite, the tennis and golf and lawn bowling, and the promise of a fantastical amusement park lifestyle. The region is thriving. Sir Adam Beck is building the world’s largest hydro power station. Nikola Tesla has found a way to make electricity accessible to all of humanity. And a man named King Camp Gillette has developed plans for a futuristic utopian society that would have the mighty Niagara River as its lifeblood. Add two men with special abilities and powerful incentives. Jack Saunders is a troubled veteran of the First World War who desperately wants to make a good life for his beloved wife and friends, but his addictions and impulsive behaviour keep turning his noble intentions into disaster. Aaron O’Malley is an affluent business owner who sees that the region is on the verge of an evolution, one that he must cultivate for his personal gain. But O’Malley needs Jack. He preys upon his vulnerability and draws him into an ambitious scheme that he claims will bring wealth and power beyond their wildest dreams. History is about to change, and Jack is the key to its outcome.

Begin with 1918 Niagara-on-the-lake: its opulence and extravagance, the actors and the elite, the tennis and golf and lawn bowling, and the promise of a fantastical amusement park lifestyle. The region is thriving. Sir Adam Beck is building the world’s largest hydro power station. Nikola Tesla has found a way to make electricity accessible to all of humanity. And a man named King Camp Gillette has developed plans for a futuristic utopian society that would have the mighty Niagara River as its lifeblood. Add two men with special abilities and powerful incentives. Jack Saunders is a troubled veteran of the First World War who desperately wants to make a good life for his beloved wife and friends, but his addictions and impulsive behaviour keep turning his noble intentions into disaster. Aaron O’Malley is an affluent business owner who sees that the region is on the verge of an evolution, one that he must cultivate for his personal gain. But O’Malley needs Jack. He preys upon his vulnerability and draws him into an ambitious scheme that he claims will bring wealth and power beyond their wildest dreams. History is about to change, and Jack is the key to its outcome.

The New York Times–bestselling classic set amid the mountains and streams of early twentieth-century Montana, “as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway” (Chicago Tribune). When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Today, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs Through It has established itself as a classic of the American West filled with beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.” “Maclean’s book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren.” —New York Times Book Review Includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award–winning film adaptation

The story of two generations of scientific explorers in South America—Richard Evans Schultes and his protégé Wade Davis—an epic tale of adventure and a compelling work of natural history. In 1941, Professor Richard Evan Schultes took a leave from Harvard and disappeared into the Amazon, where he spent the next twelve years mapping uncharted rivers and living among dozens of Indian tribes. In the 1970s, he sent two prize students, Tim Plowman and Wade Davis, to follow in his footsteps and unveil the botanical secrets of coca, the notorious source of cocaine, a sacred plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality. A stunning account of adventure and discovery, betrayal and destruction, One River is a story of two generations of explorers drawn together by the transcendent knowledge of Indian peoples, the visionary realms of the shaman, and the extraordinary plants that sustain all life in a forest that once stood immense and inviolable.