THE WHITE ’64 CADILLAC convertible takes up most of Atlas Peak Road on its corkscrew passage through steeply tilted land above Napa Valley, gliding past hillside property strewn with volcanic rocks and views to kill for, as they say in the real estate flyers.

The pilot of this chromed retro land-launch is a big, rangy guy in Levi’s and a baseball cap on which is embroidered his last name—Pahlmeyer—a name that may ring a bell with those who saw the Michael Douglas&150;Demi Moore picture Disclosure. The movie’s plot centers on a seduction attempted with a bottle of chardonnay—Jayson Pahlmeyer’s chardonnay. “I could have sold 400,000 cases as a result of that movie,” Pahlmeyer says, turning into his narrow driveway. “The mail was overwhelming. It came in bags.”

Movie fame carries only so much weight in this tight little valley north of San Francisco Bay, a place inured to the presence of Francis Ford Coppola and unimpressed by news of Robert Redford’s leasing a house and rumors about Madonna’s shopping around. But producing good, exclusive wine, now that’s important. Pahlmeyer makes only 6,000 cases of wine a year, a minuscule output by industry standards. Once you get on his mailing list, you can still wait three years for the privilege of buying a case at about $75 per bottle.

The greeting on his answering machine teasingly says, “Please leave a message while I uncork a powerful Pahlmeyer merlot.” Which is just what he does—it’s a ’97—once we enter the angular steel-and-glass house where he lives with his wife, Paige. He sprawls on the couch in the raised living room, overlooking an interior he describes as “high-tech Italian industrial.” Remodeled in 1988 by San Francisco architect Michael Guthrie, the house features a steel spiral staircase and a glass-paned wall that rises electronically like a garage door to allow the dining table to be rolled out to the pool. The far edge of the patio opens out into the viewshed: broad green valley, salty estuary where the ailing (according to the EPA) Napa River flows into San Pablo Bay. The spires of San Francisco are lost in a bank of fog to the south, and beyond, unseen but not unfelt, lies Silicon Valley.

Pahlmeyer, 55, is no endowed computer geek, but there are plenty of those in the hills—the latest grape-loving arrivistes in a long line of hopeful vintners who began showing up in droves back in the 1960s. Pahlmeyer came in 1985, when new faces tended to be real estate developers rather than high-tech CEOs, and today he has what the techies all want: an interesting house, a vineyard of his own, and a wine with his name on it that few can afford. Formerly a lawyer, Pahlmeyer had a vision—”making a wine that drops you to your knees”—and pluck. He helped smuggle clones of French vines into this country through Canada, hired good people, and was soon producing several varieties of dense, luscious wines, attracting favorable reviews, and, consequently, a call from the producers of Disclosure.

And yet if Pahlmeyer’s own story were to be made into a movie today, it would not be about an attorney trading torts for a farm and creating a dazzling vintage. Instead, the pitch would go something like this: High-profile vintner tells cowboy to deliver new rocket-juice pronto, and succeeds, only to get slammed by radical environmentalists. That is, vintner (Pahlmeyer) engages a top-flight manager (cowboy) to create a choice cabernet (rocket juice) plot, which he does before he has an approved erosion-control plan. Two years after being cited and fined by Napa County for proceeding without the approved plan, the vintner then has construction on the final few acres of his vineyard temporarily shut down in September 1999, again because of concern over hillside erosion. Later that same month, the Sierra Club sues the County of Napa for failing to enforce the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and also sues Pahlmeyer and two other growers, The Best Cellar/Vineyard Properties West and Chateau Potelle, for expanding their vineyards with the county’s “illegal” permits. The lawsuits result in a de facto moratorium on all permits to clear and plant Napa Valley slopes.

“I’m the poster child for hillside development,” Pahlmeyer laments. “‘Pahlmeyer rapes the land!'”

Behind both the lawsuits and the county’s orders to cease construction was Pahlmeyer’s neighbor, Chris Malan, and her benefactor, Peter Mennen, a surprisingly deep-pocketed postmaster in the nearby town of St. Helena. During 1999, after losing patience with the county’s spirit of compromise, the two succeeded in delivering a stinging blow to Napa’s elite. In their wake, the once enlightened choice of returning to the land to sow and reap a natural harvest has come under fire as an invasive “lifestyle” of rapaciousness and greed. Even the idea of agriculture as a bulwark against residential and commercial development has temporarily lost its luster—at least in wine country. And the uproar had ordinarily unflappable men like Jayson Pahlmeyer deeply dismayed. “I can see a time coming in America,” he says, “when you have no idea what you will be allowed to do with your own land.”

The Adventurist: My Life in Dangerous Places
by Robert Young Pelton (Doubleday, $25)
The author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places and Come Back Alive delves into his battered valise for a combined memoir and travelogue that reads like a squeezed-off Kalashnikov—staccato episodes of dirty little wars and wilderness forays alternating with quick takes in the rearview mirror. One minute Pelton is in a bloody conflict in Afghanistan and the next he’s remembering his boyhood in Canada, the beginnings of a “turbulent life that was to contain an intricate pattern of sights, smells, sounds, senses, and impressions.” Just as you digest one disturbing anecdote—the time, say, that three-year-old Pelton’s distraught and abused mother put his head through the kitchen wall—it’s fast-forward to Southern California to drink with Navy SEALs and take another stab at macho self-examination: “I’m not military, nor am I easy with taking orders, backing causes, or even caring to die on principle.” Suddenly the kid at an Ontario school for borderline delinquents is a middle-aged man with many real (and some manufactured) adventures under his belt—sojourns in Borneo, Pakistan, Tanzania, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Pelton says he found his calling on the day he stood under a portrait of Sir Richard Burton in London’s Tate Gallery and realized that a life of adventure, bankrolled by articles and documentaries, was the only way to go. In these brief flashes, Pelton gets the adrenaline flowing but leaves finesse behind—in Mali, for instance, “the heat slams you down like a drunk in a bar fight.” He winds up showing us how to travel dangerously, if not how to write.Ìý

The Snakebite Survivors’ Club: Travels Among Serpents
by Jeremy Seal (Harcourt, $24)
Frightened of snakes as a child, the author of A Fez of the Heart, a memoir of teaching in Turkey, decides to deal with his persistent herpetological dread by searching out the worst of “thanatophidia” (a Victorian term for death-dealing snakes)—from the king cobra of India to Africa’s black mamba to the taipan, a particularly nasty bit of Australian coil with venom six times stronger than a cobra’s and a disposition to match. Along the way, Seal encounters both self-styled snake charmers (like the boozy “King of the Reptiles”of Mamallapuram, India) and real snake catchers (like Francis Ngombo of South Africa, who travels on public buses with a noosed stick and writhing sacks). Seal’s white-knuckled voyage is more about people than snakes and is enlarged by well-researched historical detail and squinty-eyed snapshots of the scaly global outback, from the American South to South America. Creepy snakebite stories abound, including one about a fundamentalist Christian serpent handler in Alabama who tried to off his wife with an ecclesiastical rattlesnake. Seal’s writing is vivid, humorous, and wonderfully chilling.Ìý

Teewinot: A Year in the Grand Tetons
by Jack Turner (Thomas Dunne Books, $24)
This veteran guide and pissed-off lover of wilderness (see his last book, 1996’s The Abstract Wild) meditates on decades of experience in one of America’s most heavily used national parks. The title refers to a 12,325-foot peak, a rocky epiphany hanging in the view from the cabin Turner built and lived in for 18 summerswhile guiding climbers and otherwise serving as a knowledgeable custodian of the park. One of the better known of the Exum guides, Turner describes, in this year of rambling and recollection, badass climbs with such famous Exumites as Leigh Ortenburger and the late Alex Lowe, and thoughtfully juxtaposes his Teton excursions with journeys as far afield as the Himalayas. Finely detailed descriptions of trail life make readers see the specific beauty of remote ranges, taste hot milky tea on subzero mornings, mourn with him the deaths of friends like Lowe, and dread disasters like the Wyoming storm that engulfed the author and a party of novices (“Above us, mature cumulonimbus bulged like muscles…a lightning bolt hit a glacier and turned it green”). Woven into all of this is a paean to America’s public lands that may lack the fierce iconoclasm of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire but conveys a similar sense of loss: “What was protected by a handful of nature’s patrons and the federal government remains beautiful; what was not protected has been forever despoiled for the benefit of a few.” Anyone interested in difficult country and the inspiration it provides would do well to read these accounts of climbing, trekking, and thinking.Ìý

The Water in Between
by Kevin Patterson (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $24)
If a klutz like Patterson can sail to the South Seas, so can you. But writing about it this well is something else again. The author, a physician, mixes high-seas pratfalls with tempestuous love affairs, and all of his escapades are funny and touching. Distraught over losing a girlfriend, this young doctor leaves his post as a medic in the Canadian Army and buys a boat, the Sea Mouse—who but a devout ironist would attempt to sail to from Victoria, B.C., to Tahiti and back again in a craft so named?—despite knowing zilch about sailing. Patterson’s salvation is a similarly lovelorn sheet-metal worker and sailor named Don, who agrees to accompany him on this fool’s journey. Don is remarkably forgiving of the author’s ineptitude, including Patterson’s destruction of a sail just off Seattle and his loss of the anchor shortly after that. The two men get to know and like each other in the horse latitudes of the mid-Pacific, where by day “the light is like a magnesium flare,” and by night “the starless sky lay on the horizon like black silk on onyx.” Patterson’s comic-obsessive reflections on loves past and the allure of other modern travel writers (particularly the late Bruce Chatwin) are mordantly insightful: “Self-contempt and misanthropy are the parents of peripateticism.”In a satisfying denouement, he successfully solos from Hawaii back to Canada, stronger, wiser, and a better, though no less amusing, sailor.

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In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking, $25). This retooling of one of history’s most disturbing seafaring tales, the sinking of the Essex in 1820, contains two certified attention-getters—attack by monster, and cannibalism. The author, a historian, draws on several 19th-century accounts (two of which were reissued last year) in this taut nonfiction thriller, salted with recent starvation studies and larded with period whaling details. The 240-ton Essex set sail from Nantucket in August 1819 with a mostly Quaker crew and met its nemesis 15 months later in the Pacific: an 80-foot sperm whale that became the inspiration for Herman Melville’s white leviathan in Moby-Dick. “With its huge scarred head halfway out of the water,” Philbrick writes, “and its tail beating the ocean into a white-water wake more than 40 feet across,” the whale rammed the ship twice, piercing her hull and sinking her in a matter of minutes, relegating the 20-man crew to three leaky whaleboats with little drinking water and a terrifying decision: Should they head west, toward the nearby Society Islands, believed to be inhabited by hostile natives; or backtrack 3,500 miles to South America? Captain George Pollard Jr. turned east and wound up devouring a portion of his first cousin. (“Gastronomic incest,” a scholar later called it.) Only five men survived, rescued by American whalers off the Chilean coast, having been sustained by the flesh of their deceased—in one case, executed—mates. Philbrick keeps the questions of endurance and guilt before readers, along with a fair helping of irony: The crew had feared the Society Islanders because they were said to practice cannibalism.Ìý

Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed, by Dean King (Henry Holt, $28). Set during the Na-poleonic Wars, O’Brian’s acclaimed Aubrey-Maturin seafaring novels (20 in all, the first and most famous of which is Master and Commander) created an enormous readership of vicarious voyagers. Fans may be surprised to learn that the author had limited sailing experience and never once set foot on a square-rigged ship. What’s more, we learn in this first biography of O’Brian, who died in January at 85, the writer’s whole life was fiction: He was not Irish, but English, and changed his name from Richard Patrick Russ after abandoning his wife and two small children (one with spina bifida) in 1940. Remarried and settled in France by 1949, O’Brian churned out everything from novels to a biography of Picasso. But it was the meticulously researched seafaring series, starting in 1969, that earned him a cult following among sailors and history buffs and, ultimately, literary kudos and wealth. Although King was the first to discover O’Brian’s real identity, he was publicly outed as a Brit by a 1998 exposé in an English newspaper. He continued to guard his privacy jealously, and refused to cooperate with King—an American whose diligent sleuthing does indeed reveal a life but, as he admits himself, something less than the whole man.

My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas’ Deepest Mystery, by Reinhold Messner (St. Martin’s Press, $24). The man who ascended Everest solo and without oxygen in 1978, and was the first to summit all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks, attempts an equally daunting task: solving the mystery of the yeti. For centuries that phantom has fascinated cryptozoologists trying—and failing—to document its existence. Messner, for his part, is convinced that one followed him through the eastern Tibetan woods in 1986. His short, rambling investigation takes the reader through a Tibetan landscape occupied by the Chinese army but still dominated by the teachings of the Buddhist lamas, and across Nepal, where hermits, monks, and villagers all report encounters with the beast. Messner decides that the yeti’s real and imaginary components are linked in a misty conflation of demon and quasi-human fauna known to locals across the region as mete, lungomba, tshute, dremo, dzu teh, and mih teh. To Westerners the yeti has been an abominable snowman, a lost member of Gigantopithicus, and—to the Nazis—a “cold-resistant Proto-Aryan.” In the end, Messner comes up with little more than a speculative fistful of hair and a theory that the yeti is a rare and furtive subspecies of brown bear that dwells “in the opposition between civilization and wilderness.Ìý

Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf, $25). In his first novel since The English Patient, Ondaatje again uses human suffering as a backdrop for exotic characters lost in cultural anomie. The setting is modern-day Sri Lanka riven by a three-way war among the army, revolutionaries, and separatists; the protagonist is Anil Tissera, a comely forensic pathologist trying to make sense of it all. Sri Lankan by birth, American by choice, Tissera returns to her homeland to look into the charge that citizens are being systematically murdered by their government. Her search focuses on one of several skeletons of the recently “disappeared” unearthed at an archaeological dig. If she can identify it and discover where the victim was killed, she can prove crime and cover-up by highly placed authorities. Anil’s foil is the enigmatic Sarath, a talented archaeologist who both helps and hinders her progress through the sinister, vaguely delineated political landscape. Ondaatje’s portrait of rural Sri Lanka is affectingly lush and dreamy—”with the dark green light of morning around them, the men appeared to float over the open landscape”—but the narrative rambles and the violence that is its subject takes place mostly offstage, lending the story a gauziness at odds with its awful realities.

FROM OUR PAGES
A Viking Voyage, in which W. Hodding Carter crosses the Atlantic in a Viking knarr, began as a 1998 ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø article (Ballantine, $25). Fresh Air Fiend, Paul Theroux’s latest travel collection, includes several recent ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø stories (Houghton Mifflin, $27).

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The Last Marlin
by Fred Waitzkin (Viking, $24)
The author of Searching for Bobby Fischer has written a graceful father-son memoir that artfully braids rich, disparate strands: Atlantic game fishing, the New York wholesale hustle, dysfunctional Jewish clannishness, and the decline of pelagic life. It’s the story of a boy growing up on Long Island in the 1950s under the mismatched influences of his parents: Waitzkin’s father is a sickly, Luckies-sucking supersalesman who introduces saltwater angling to his two sons; his mother is a jazz-bedazzled painter whose father owns the family fluorescent-lighting business and who hangs out with Jackson Pollock while disdaining both maternity and fishing. This elegiac view of remnant worlds, of stinkpots and what is now called declining family values, infuses the book with tragedy even as it celebrates the slap of tuna on wet decks off Montauk and Bimini. Waitzkin comes to understand how his father’s obsession to prevail in business and his mother’s rejection of all conventional ambitions destroyed their marriage and left their sons adrift. Only fishing offers wonder, and hope: “The ocean just opens up, reveals itself…there’s no more resistance or dead water, the clues are sharp and urgent.” But despite the unraveling of both family and family business, the author maintains his affection for his difficult, spendthrift father. He marries a woman who, unlike his mother, happily fishes and cuts bait; after his father’s death, he transforms himself from son to dad with her help. Meanwhile, however, his beloved Bimini is also transformed—by sportsmen in ever-bigger boats comparing catch-and-release to sex without orgasm as they eagerly decimate the figurative last marlin.

Barrow’s Boys: The Original Extreme ºÚÁϳԹÏÍørs, a Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy
by Fergus Fleming (Atlantic Monthly, $26)
John Barrow, Second Secretary of the British Admiralty from 1816 to 1848, possessed, in his own words, “an inherent and inveterate hatred of idleness,” particularly other people’s. This deskbound commander dispatched armies of explorers in search of the sources of the Congo and Niger Rivers as well as the fabled Northwest Passage. Like most stouthearted Englishmen of his day, he became fascinated with the Arctic, just as we are today with the men who first plunged headlong into that world of ice. Bent on discovering the Passage, he secured government backing for John Ross, William Edward Parry, and John Franklin, among others, many of whom encountered incredible hardship and even death. This book is more a crowded history than a biography of Barrow, and some of the stories of his dauntless boys are presented a bit too dryly. But Fleming has done well to reintroduce us to those hard explorers and to the era’s most effective armchair traveler.Ìý

Frost on My Moustache: The Arctic Exploits of a Lord and a Loafer
by Tim Moore (St. Martin’s, $24)
Decidedly less grand exploratory aspirations emerge from this travelogue, in which British humorist Moore sets out to retrace the voyage of one “Marquess of Dufferin and Ava,” who supposedly sailed circa 1850 from England to Iceland, Norway, and Spitzbergen not in pursuit of glory or new lands, but merely for the hell of it. (As the reader suspects, this Marquess is wholly fictional.) In the same spirit, Moore is highly attuned to human fallibility—his own—and general ludicrousness, and finds both in watery Scandinavian lands ripe with pylsurs (hot dogs), moonshine, and unfailingly friendly natives. Instantly ill on his sail north in a container ship from Scotland, Moore never fully recovers, which lends his tale—merely funny when not debilitatingly hilarious—an English patient’s perspective through a careening porthole. Alternately whining and projectile vomiting, Moore bikes across Iceland, bends an elbow with various slightly daft Norsepersons, and almost collides with a volcano on a prop-plane tour of the fog-fouled island of Jan Mayen. By this point we no longer care that Dufferin is Moore’s invention. The pleasure of this tale derives from the author’s own excellent folly, and from his send-up of those super-serious historical re-creations in which humor is left at home.

Horse Heaven
by Jane Smiley (Knopf, $26)
The author of A Thousand Acres has written a brick of a novel that deals with Thoroughbreds and humans, in that order. Smiley weaves together more than a dozen plots—story lines that, studded with stirring outdoor spectacle, transport the reader from Del Mar and Aqueduct to Churchill Downs and Epsom Downs. The thrill of racing is muddied by the interior musings of both anthropomorphized horses and crooked people: owners with more money than brains and riders with plenty of brass and zero emotional equilibrium. Buddy Crawford, trainer and born-again Christian, and one of the many shapers of horseflesh who provide a kind of collective protagonist, distills the novel’s brutal thesis: “None of these horses would be here if they weren’t meant to race and win. The breeder is their God and the racetrack is their destiny and running is their work.” In service of that absolutism, humans hobnob in a moveable feast of expensive digs and ultimate tack, shining briefly like racers in the paddock and then fading as new contenders are led in. The genre is high-tone blockbuster, the voice breezy. The best characters embody both horse sense and human longing; the best scenes are the races, with their clod-slinging elation and disappointment. Smiley knows her stuff, from rigged auctions to split hooves, but by the finish line the reader has wearied of this flawed culture and its rules and heroes, all of the latter equine.