The timely story of how the forces of change converge on a small tribe of Niaruna Indians living in the heart of the Amazon rain forest. In addition to being a prophetic commentary on emerging threats to the environment, and the troublesome encroachment of the modern world on traditional cultures, the novel is a suspenseful adventure story about two men striving to find meaning in a world not their own.

In a malarial outpost in the South American rain forest, two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the fearful and elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local commandante. Out of their struggle, Peter Matthiessen has created an electrifying moral thriller, a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual experience and the politics of cultural genocide.

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One of a very few National Book Award honorees to be nominated for fiction and nonfiction, Peter Matthiessen creates a curious blend of both in this tragic prequel to Killing Mister Watson and Lost Man’s River. An amazing novel in its own right, Bone by Bone caps the trilogy featuring the enigmatic E.J. Watson. During the Reconstruction Era, Edgar Watson grew up in the South at the mercy of a brutal alcoholic father and a vindictive mother. Witnessing the horrors of slavery, bilked out of his inheritance, and blamed in his youth for a murder he didn’t commit, E.J. developed a reputation for violence that preceded him everywhere he went. Finally, it brought him to a tragic and bloody end as his family watched in helpless horror. Borrowing an old local tale about a man who was killed by his neighbors, Matthiessen creates a powerful character. George Guidall’s excellent reading brings this moving tragedy home to us with a passion.

Un hombre sale de viaje y es otro quien regresa.>> Este es el sentido del viaje de Matthiessen, y de todo autentico viaje. En otono de 1973 el escritor Peter Matthiessen y el zoologo George Schaller emprendieron una expedicion a la Montana de Cristal, en la meseta del Tibet, para estudiar los habitos de un animal no muy conocido: el bharal o cordero azul himalayo. Pero su autentica esperanza era poder ver al mas hermoso y raro de los grandes felinos: el leopardo de las nieves. Para Matthiessen, adentrarse en la tierra de Dolpo significara mucho mas que una expedicion naturalista o una aventura: despojarse de las ventajas y las ataduras de la civilizacion, convivir con hombres y paisajes en su mas elemental belleza, adentrarse en el mismo por las vias que le proporcionan el budismo o el zen

A profoundly searching new novel by a writer of incomparable range, power, and achievement.

In the winter of 1996, more than a hundred women and men of diverse nationality, background, and belief gather at the site of a former concentration camp for an unprecedented purpose: a weeklong retreat during which they will offer prayer and witness at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform, while eating and sleeping in the quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews to their deaths. Clements Olin, an American academic of Polish descent, has come along, ostensibly to complete research on the death of a survivor, even as he questions what a non-Jew can contribute to the understanding of so monstrous a catastrophe. As the days pass, tensions, both political and personal, surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to healing or closure. Finding himself in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer’s role and to embrace a history his family has long suppressed—and with it the yearnings and contradictions of being fully alive.

In Paradise is a brave and deeply thought-provoking novel by one of our most stunningly accomplished writers.

On a hot June morning in 1975, a fatal shoot-out took place between FBI agents and American Indians on a remote property near Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in which an Indian and two federal agents were killed. Eventually, four members of the American Indian Movement were indicted on murder charges in the deaths of the two agents. Leonard Peltier, the only one to be convicted, is now serving consecutive life sentences in a federal penitentiary.

Behind this violent chain of events lie issues of great complexity and profound historical resonance. In this controversial book, Peter Matthiessen brilliantly explicates the larger issues behind the shoot-out, including the Lakota Indians’ historical struggle with the US government, from Red Cloud’s war and Little Big Horn in the nineteenth century to the shameful discrimination that led to the new Indian wars of 1970s.

This powerful book was censored and kept off the shelves for eight years because of one of the most protracted and bitterly fought legal cases in publishing history.

When Peter Matthiessen was 17, he was told the story of Edgar J. Watson, a popular and successful planter who had been murdered by his neighbors in 1910. This novel is Matthiessen’s attempt to piece together the life of a mysterious man who became a legend, and the dangerous legend that destroyed him. During the Reconstruction Era, Edgar Watson grew up in the South at the mercy of a brutal alcoholic father and a vindictive mother. Witnessing the horrors of slavery, bilked out of his inheritance, and blamed in his youth for a murder he didn’t commit, E.J. developed a reputation for violence that preceded him everywhere he went. Finally, it brought him to a tragic and bloody end as his family watched in helpless horror. Borrowing an old local tale about a man who was killed by his neighbors, Matthiessen creates a powerful character. George Guidall’s excellent reading brings this moving tragedy home to us with a passion.

Critically-acclaimed novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen deftly weaves together the fortunes and tragedies of Florida Everglades folk in this foreboding thriller. Haunted by the legacy of his father’s violent reputation and brutal death, historian Lucius Watson seeks to understand the man behind the legend. In 1910, an enraged mob of neighbors gunned down murder suspect E.J. Watson-each claiming it was self-defense. Over four decades later, his son Lucius returns to Lost Man’s River to discover the truth behind that horrible day. Was his father really a cold-blooded murderer, feared by all? Or was he a man of progress and vision, killed by those who envied him? Alternately threatened and shunned, Lucius relentlessly digs for answers, even while he fears the truth. In this dazzling sequel to Killing Mr. Watson, Peter Matthiessen presents the story of a family riddled with scandal through colorful recollections of renegades and their descendants. Veteran narrator George Guidall brings the rich oral history dramatically to life.

Shadow Country is Peter Matthiessen’s reimagining of the legend of E. J. Watson, the Everglades sugarcane planter and notorious outlaw of the wild Florida frontier. Vividly capturing the American hinterlands at the turn of the twentieth century, it traces the story of Watson through eyewitness perspectives as he drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him.

Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, “still casts its shadow over the nation.” Originally written as three separate, acclaimed novels, this is Matthiessen’s bold new distillation of his monumental work. Tightened and brilliantly rewritten throughout, he has collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters, achieving his original vision of the Watson trilogy.

For twenty thousand miles, Peter Matthiessen crisscrossed the South American wilderness, traveling from the Amazonian rain forests to Machu Picchu high in the Andes, down to the edge of the world at Tierra del Fuego and back. In the course of his journey, he followed the trails of old explorers; encountered river bandits, wild tribesmen, and the evidence of ancient ruins; and discovered a fossilized snout of a giant unknown crocodilian hidden in the depths of the jungle on the wild mountain rivers of Peru.

Filled with observations and descriptions of the people and the fading wildlife of this vast world to the south, The Cloud Forest is Matthiessen’s incisive, wry report of his expedition into some of the last and most exotic wild terrains in the world.

An unforgettable spiritual journey through the Himalayas…

IN 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty.

In this classic volume, Peter Matthiessen exquisitely combines nature and travel writing to bring East Africa to vivid life. He skillfully and magically portrays the sights, scenes, and people he observed firsthand in several trips over the course of a dozen years: the daily lives of herdsmen and hunter-gatherers; the drama of the predator kills; the hundreds of exotic animals; the breathtaking landscapes; the area’s turbulent natural, political, and social histories; the adventures of the field biologists who pursue and investigate the habits of wild creatures; the anthropologists seeking man’s origins throughout the Rift Valley; and the lonely African, poised between the traditional ways and the conflicting demands of Western culture.

A finalist for the National Book Award when it was released in 1972, this vivid portrait of East Africa remains as fresh and revelatory now as on the day it was first published.

Author of At Play in the Fields of the Lord, national Book Award winner Peter Matthiessen is an accomplished naturalist and one of the most acclaimed writers in the world. This book is a stirring look at the tiger, a magnificent animal that has long fueled human fascination. In critical danger of extinction, only a few thousand of these giant cats remain. Matthiessen’s exquisite prose stunningly captures the tigers’ dramatic fight to survive.