{ "item_title" : "The Peter Matthiessen Reader", "item_author" : [" Peter Matthiessen", "McKay Jenkins "], "item_description" : "Our greatest modern nature writer in the lyrical tradition. --The New York Times Book ReviewMatthiessen is a great travel companion. . . . His knowledge of plants, animals and people is breathtaking. --The Boston GlobePerhaps 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.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/37/570/272/0375702725_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "17.95", "online_price" : "17.95", "our_price" : "17.95", "club_price" : "17.95", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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If you haven't read the nonfiction works of Peter Matthiessen, or you merely yearn for a one-volume greatest hits album, a new book offers the ideal sampler buffet. The Peter Matthiessen Reader: A Selection of Nonfiction, the latest in Vintage's ongoing series of handsome trade paperback series of Readers, features excerpts from every nonfiction book by Matthiessen in the period covered. From Wildlife in America to Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution, from The Tree Where Man Was Born to In the Spirit of Crazy Horse - the breadth is astonishing. With an artistry denied to most naturalists and an expertise few literary writers ever attain, Matthiessen easily earns his place in the pantheon of great nature writers.

In a thoughtful introduction, the editor, McKay Jenkins, places Matthiessen's work in the context of his life. The subsequent selections prove that Matthiessen is eagerly - sometimes urgently - trying to articulate the lives of the less articulate, whether animal or human. This broad sampling of his work reminds us that Matthiessen's nature writing is motivated by the same curiosity, compassion, and love of life as his fiction. Like Thoreau, he is eager to report the glory of the universe.