African Silences - Hardcover

Matthiessen, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679400214 ISBN 13: 9780679400219

Publisher: Random House Inc, 1991

Synopsis

African Silences is a powerful and sobering account of the cataclysmic depredation of the African landscape and its wildlife. In this critically acclaimed work Peter Matthiessen explores new terrain on a continent he has written about in two previous books, A Tree Where Man Was Born -- nominated for the National Book Award -- and Sand Rivers.

Through his eyes we see elephants, white rhinos, gorillas, and other endangered creatures of the wild. We share the drama of the journeys themselves, including a hazardous crossing of the continent in a light plane. And along the way, we learn of the human lives oppressed by bankrupt political regimes and economies, and threatened by the slow ecological catastrophe to which they have only begun to awaken.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

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: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0679400214
• ISBN 13: 9780679400219
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1