Splendor

Having grown up under the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis and annihilation through nuclear war, the author set out on a lifelong journey to discover why a nearly godly race known as human beings seems doomed to destroy the world. To solve this great dilemma, he tried to find a new way of living that he calls splendor. He pursued this elusive quality, like many of his time, through knowledge, adventure, spirituality, success and love. (And, of course, through sex, drugs and Rock ‘n Roll). His quest would take him from the terror of death in the Grand Tetons to the wonder of life in the birth of his daughters to writing visionary fiction in celebration of both. Along the way, meetings with Robin Williams, Timothy Leary, Ken Wilber, and others famous, infamous and unknown, helped to shape him in different ways. This is the story of how a writer seeks experience and how that is translated into literature – and how writing itself can be an expression of splendor. It also tells how his work has been a dialogue with all the hopes, conceits, frustrations, failures and glories of the true Greatest Generation that some call the Baby Boomers. Whatever one thinks of the millions born beneath the shadow of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the author argues, the fate of the earth now lies in their hands – and in those who come after them. For their uncompleted task of overcoming the destructive forces of power, pride, wealth and war holds a lesson for all of us: that only through returning to the great dream of our youth and reclaiming our essential splendor will we fulfil our destiny to lead the way into an almost unimaginably brilliant future.“SPLENDOR is a simply remarkable, passionate, transcendent book which shines a light on our times, and on all of us. I absolutely loved it.” – Jane Johnson, author of The Sultan’s Wife“David Zindell's Splendor features many of the characteristics of courageous confessional autobiography, with much of the intelligent spiritual uplift of Thomas Merton's classic autobiography, The Seven-Storey Mountain. It also reads like compelling speculative anthropology, sociology, and history. All the while, its structuring theme – the life-affirming concept of splendor – gives it a philosophical touchstone that centers and unites all of Zindell's major concerns, from love to the recurrent inhumanity of our species, from the death of spirit in raw material pursuits to the star-driven quest for ultimate meaning. I can't say enough about the honesty, the thoughtfulness, or the power of this rare book. – Michael Bishop, author of No Enemy But Time