The Snow Leopard
Matthiessen trekked to the Himalayas of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and wrote a meditation on Buddhism, grief (his wife had just died of cancer), and the nature of searching. The snow leopard is almost never seen. That's the point.
The common complaint is a bait-and-switch: readers expecting a wildlife expedition get “endless pages of dense reflections on Buddhism,” where “esoteric babble overshadows expedition details,” and the animal that titles the book barely appears. A cluster object to Matthiessen leaving his freshly motherless eight-year-old son for two months, and a critic notes an “openness to experience that ignores the impact of others can feel empty.” The tone toward Sherpas and villagers reads as paternalistic, and the register lands “very hippie, with a hectoring tone.” The “rapturous drug descriptions” undercut its spiritual authority for some, and even sympathetic readers admit it “wasn't quite gripping at first.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
