Book description
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. 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
.
