Product Description
"Our greatest modern nature writer in the lyrical tradition." --The New York Times Book Review
"Matthiessen is a great travel companion. . . . His knowledge of plants, animals and people is breathtaking." --The Boston Globe
Perhaps no writer has better articulated our relationship to the environment than Peter Matthiessen. From Wildlife in America to Men's Lives, his work has captured the wonder of the natural world--and the horrors of resource exploitation, with its violent effects on traditional peoples and the poor.
In The Peter Matthiessen Reader, editor McKay Jenkins presents a single-volume collection of this distinguished author's nonfiction. Here are essays and excerpts that highlight the spiritual, literary, and political daring so crucial to Matthiessen's vision. Matthiessen chronicles his 250-mile trek across the Himalaya to the Tibetan Plateau in a selection from the National Book Award winner The Snow Leopard. Wild peoples, wilderness, and wildlife--common themes throughout Matthiessen's oeuvre--are examined with grace and power in The Tree Where Man Was Born. Here too are excerpts from Indian Country and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Matthiessen's stunning exposé of the Leonard Peltier case and the ongoing conflict between the U.S. government and the American Indian Movement. Comprehensive and engrossing, The Peter Matthiessen Reader celebrates an American voice unequaled in its commitment to literature's noblest aspiration: to challenge us to perceive our world--as well as ourselves--truthfully and clearly.
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Amazon.com Review
Over the last half century, Peter Matthiessen has enriched American literature with a series of influential, highly regarded novels, many set in out-of-the-way places. Along with these novels, Matthiessen has written 16 books of nonfiction that explore issues in the conservation of animal species and human cultures--books such as Wildlife in America, an early contribution to the literature of environmental awareness, and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, a defense of American Indian activism. McKay Jenkins, a literary scholar and outdoors writer, chose widely among Matthiessen's nonfiction work for this anthology, which includes excerpts from well-known (The Snow Leopard) and forgotten (Sal Si Puedes) books alike. Jenkins's careful selections highlight Matthiessen's many strengths as a lyrical interpreter of nature who has joined a poetic appreciation for nature to a hard-edged, fact-based style of reportage. The reader of this book will visit episodes of life and death in highland New Guinea and arid South Dakota, learn about the astounding migration patterns of Eskimo curlews and the feeding habits of great white sharks, and be transported to mountain summits and jungle rivers. Those armchair journeys come thanks to an extraordinary writer whose work, Jenkins writes, "is marked above all by an unblinking gaze at the world's subtle beauty, and at its fragility when set against humankind's blundering self-interest." --Gregory McNamee
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