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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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THE RAINMAN'S THIRD CURE

Peter Coyote

An Irregular Education

The new memoir by the internationally-recognized actor, political strategist and pivotal player in 1960’s counterculture, Peter Coyote. In it, he reflects on the mentors that taught him to balance both his artistic calling and his deep spiritual engagement with the world.
The guiding metaphor in Peter Coyote’s new spiritual biography is drawn from a line in an early Bob Dylan song. For Coyote, the twin forces Dylan identifies as Texas Medicine and Railroad Gin represent the competing forces of the transcendental, inclusive, and ecstatic world of love and the competitive, status-seeking world of wealth and power. The Rainman’s Third Cure is the tale of a young man caught between these apparently antipodal options and the journey that leads him from privileged halls of power to Greenwich Village jazz bars, to jail, to the White House, to government service, and international success on stage and screen.

Expanding his frame beyond his wild ride through the 1960s counterculture that occupied so much of his lauded debut memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors that shaped him—a violent, intimidating father; a bebop bass player who teaches him that life can be improvised; a Mafia consiglieri who demonstrates to him that men can be bought and manipulated; a gay dancer in Martha Graham’s company who introduces him to Mexico and marijuana; and beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduces him to Zen practice.

What begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen deepens into a life-long avocation. Through Zen, Coyote discovers a third option that offers an alternative to love and power’s correlatives of status seeking and material wealth.

An ordained practitioner of Zen Buddhism and a politically engaged actor, Peter Coyote has appeared in over 140 films and worked with directors like Steven Spielberg, Roman Polanski, and Martin Ritt. Coyote has won an Emmy for narrating the award-winning documentary Pacific Century. He has also narrated The West, The Dust Bowl, Prohibition, and The Roosevelts for Ken Burns. In 1993 he was awarded a Pushcart Prize for Carla’s Story, published in Zyzzyva.
Available products
Book

Published 2015-04-01 by Counterpoint

Book

Published 2015-04-01 by Counterpoint

Comments

...descriptively brilliant biographical odyssey...Presented with so many well-defined faces, there's guaranteed to be at least one Coyote, and probably more, that readers enjoy meeting.

As he showed in Sleeping Where I Fall, Peter has lived a life most of us could only dream of. In this insightful and beautifully expressed follow up, we get a deeper view not only of his own path, but of the currents underlying so much our own shared histories. Viewed through the prism of three transformational relationships, his story is as moving as it is fascinating. A remarkable book.

Peter Coyote’s new memoir is just plain wonderful—richly textured, beautifully written, sad, sweet, sometimes funny, always wise. It is about childhood losses and joy, growing up, mentors, loyalty, the search for Truth, survival, the sixties, the seventies, transcendence, healing, disasters. It is told by a writer of deep wisdom, self-knowledge and charm, yet I gobbled it up, like a novel.

Even as a boy, Peter Coyote sensed that his ‘one eye was looking out and the other was looking in.’ That capacity for acute observation combined with unsparing self-reflection permeates this engrossing memoir. In recounting his ‘unsentimental education,’ the author has written a book that deserves to stand alongside The Education of Henry Adams.

There are often people in your life that just fit perfectly & you love without question. Peter, is one of those people! His talent & worldliness have always been evident, the kindness & calm he exudes are finally explained in this book. A life well examined & accounted, that provokes thought, elicits smiles & tears & varying degrees of self-examination... sort of like spending a relaxing afternoon lunch with my friend, Peter.

Library Journal names Peter Coyote in the Memoir category of Library Journal’s BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF 2015. Read more...