African Silences - Softcover

Matthiessen, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860464122 ISBN 13: 9781860464126

Publisher: The Harvill Press, 1992

Synopsis

African Silences is a spellbinding and sobering journey through Africa's ravaged wildernesses. In 1978 and again in 1986, Matthiessen travelled through Senegal, Gambia, the Ivory Coast, Zaire and the Central African Republic to examine the fate of West African wildlife. African Silences shows Matthiessen at his best, taking the reader on hair-raising flights over forest and savanna, high-speed dashes by car along dirt roads, and slow journeys by river boat and jungle track, to encounter rare and endangered animals - elephants, gorillas and rhinos amongst them - and the wildlife biologists who study and attempt to protect them.

About this title

Review:

"Deeply gripping... with a prose of characteristic grace and perfectly distilled passion." -- Washington Post Book World
"Matthiessen is a great travel companion ..... His knowledge of plants, animals and people is breathtaking." -- Boston Globe

About the Author:

PETER MATTHIESSEN, naturalist, explorer, novelist, was born in New York City in 1927 and graduated from Yale University in 1950. He also attended the Sorbonne and, in the 1950s, co-founded the Paris Review. He worked for three years as a commercial fisherman on the ocean haul seine crews at the eastern end of Long Island, and as captain a charter fishing boat. His many expeditions to the wilderness areas of the world have taken him to Alaska, the Canadian Northwest Territories, Asia, Australia, Oceania, South America, Africa, New Guinea and Nepal - memorably described in such books as The Cloud Forest, Under the Mountain Wall, Blue Meridian, Sand Rivers, The Tree where Man Was Born (with Eliot Porter) and The Snow Leopard. Peter Matthiessen has also written eloquently of the fate of the North American Indians in Indian Country and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, and he is author of several novels, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Far Tortuga and Killing Mister Watson, as well as of the acclaimed short story collection On the River Styx.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Harvill Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1860464122
• ISBN 13: 9781860464126
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240