New Releases by Peter Matthiessen

有史以來最偉大的旅行和自然書寫作品 ★知名作者彼得．馬修森穿越喜馬拉雅山的難忘精神之旅★ 「人生的荒謬可能在我們未理解之前就結束了，可是我們（對於跟別人不可分的那個自我）仍有義務盡可能勇敢、恢弘地活過一生。」──彼得．馬修森 ★榮獲1979年美國國家圖書獎「當代思想類」 ★榮獲1980年美國國家圖書獎「一般非小說類」 ★巴黎評論創辦人自然書寫經典 ★名家宋碧雲經典譯本 一部匯合旅遊經歷、自然書寫與性靈禪修體悟 持續40年的經典著作 《雪豹》 ●國內名家一致推薦● 作家 陳德政──專文推薦 作家 謝旺霖 作家 顏擇雅 ──一致推薦 「喜馬拉雅空氣清新，山顯得近在眼前，面對這壯觀的山水，淚水靜靜浮上眼眶。這幾週來不受干擾──沒有信件、電話、不必應付旁人的需求──我的腦袋很清楚，自動自發回應萬事萬物。這種感覺很驚人。……」 1973年，作者彼得‧馬修森與動物學家喬治‧夏勒深入西藏邊界尼泊爾境內的多爾泊區，目的是研究當地特有的喜馬拉雅藍羊。不過，兩個人還有另一個目的，就是希望能一窺雪山中最珍貴美麗的傳奇生物－－雪豹。 「自然以待」及「科學研究」兩種文化態度上的差異，在作者以研究者的身分進入佛學的精神發源地「藏區」時，一股隱隱約約的、一再挑戰讀者心念的對立不斷地衝擊。我們如何看待事物、如何安置自我，都在這主觀與客觀、主體與客體的對應中遊移流轉。 師從禪宗的馬修森，在水晶山的古老寺宇間的精神追尋，最終卻成為對於身體和精神之旅的非凡描繪。因為艱苦的攀登，讓馬修森對現實、苦難、無常和美麗有了更深的佛教理解。 國內外好評 「一本美麗的書，配得上他身處的群山。」——保羅．索魯，《赫丘力士之柱》作者 「最初是對受人尊敬的佛教象徵、稀有的雪豹的探索，後來發展成為對存在意義的探索。一部登山與性靈追求，別致有趣的結合」——觀察者報 「這是一個內心為平靜而博鬥的故事，將成為鼓舞人心和支撐人的荒島最佳陪伴讀物。」——艾米莉．巴爾，作家 「既是內心旅程的編年史，也是對陌生領域的博學記錄……一部永恆的記錄」——獨立報 「對一個遙遠而永恆的地方及其人民的令人回味的描述」——星期日泰晤士報

Uma extraordinária odisseia espiritual de um homem em busca de si mesmo. Em 1973, Peter Matthiessen e George Schaller viajaram até às remotas montanhas do Nepal para estudarem o Carneiro-azul e observarem o raro e mítico Leopardo-das-neves. Matthiessen estava igualmente numa jornada espiritual para encontrar o lama de Shey no Mosteiro de Cristal. Com o desenrolar da viagem, Matthiessen descreve o seu caminho interior e exterior, aprofundando a compreensão budista da realidade, do sofrimento, da impermanência e da beleza. Um relato extraordinário de uma viagem física e espiritual que se converteu numa verdadeira peregrinação pela essência da vida.

«Un hombre sale de viaje y es otro quien regresa.» Éste es el sentido del viaje de Matthiessen, y de todo auténtico viaje. En otoño de 1973 el escritor Peter Matthiessen y el zoólogo George Schaller emprendieron una expedición a la Montaña de Cristal, en la meseta del Tíbet, para estudiar los hábitos de un animal no muy conocido: el bharal o cordero azul himalayo. Pero su auténtica esperanza era poder ver al más hermoso y raro de los grandes felinos: el leopardo de las nieves. Para Matthiessen, adentrarse en la tierra de Dolpo significará mucho más que una expedición naturalista o una aventura: despojarse de las ventajas y las ataduras de la civilización, convivir con hombres y paisajes en su más elemental belleza, adentrarse en él mismo por las vías que le proporcionan el budismo o el zen. «Lo que comenzó como una búsqueda del leopardo de las nieves, ese animal raro, venerado y emblema budista, se convirtió en una búsqueda del sentido del ser. Una soberbia combinación de montañismo y misticismo». Observer «Tanto una crónica de un viaje interior como un testimonio de lo aprendido en un territorio desconocido... Una historia atemporal». The Independent

Freshwater field tests are an integral part of the process of hazard assessment of pesticides and other chemicals in the environment. This book brings together international experts on microcosms and mesocosms for a critical appraisal of theory and practice on the subject of freshwater field tests for hazard assessment. It is an authoritative and comprehensive summary of knowledge about freshwater field tests, with particular emphasis on their optimization for scientific and regulatory purposes. This valuable reference covers both lotic and lentic outdoor systems and addresses the choice of endpoints and test methodology. Instructive case histories show how to extrapolate test results to the real world.

Nella primavera del 1972, Peter Matthiessen si imbatte a New York nel celebre naturalista e zoologo George Schaller, che gli avanza subito una proposta: unirsi a lui, nell’autunno dell’anno successivo, per una spedizione fino al Nepal nordoccidentale, vicino alla frontiera tibetana, dove non è raro avvistare il più bello e più affascinante dei grandi felini: il leopardo delle nevi, il mitico animale di cui tutti parlano e che nell’ultimo quarto di secolo solo due occidentali, tra cui Schaller stesso, hanno visto davvero. L’idea di visitare il Nepal, di approssimarsi passo passo alla più imponente catena montuosa del mondo, di arrivare alla Montagna di Cristallo e andare alla ricerca di una leggendaria creatura, è così allettante per Matthiessen che, il giorno di settembre del 1973 fissato per l’appuntamento con Schaller, si presenta puntualissimo, e perfettamente equipaggiato per la spedizione, all’albergo di Katmandu prescelto. Pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1978, Il leopardo delle nevi è considerato da allora non soltanto uno dei grandi libri di viaggio di sempre. Il grande racconto di un viaggio avventuroso tra le gole profonde e le montagne del Tibet, alla ricerca di un mitico animale e dell''essenza stessa della vita. «Un vero e proprio capolavoro della letteratura d’ogni tempo». John Hillaby «Un grande libro che compie un viaggio parallelo, accompagnando i passi fisici di un pellegrinaggio con i passi metafisici di una ricerca». Pico Iyer

The bestselling final novel by a writer of incomparable range, power, and achievement, a three-time winner of the National Book Award. Peter Matthiessen was a literary legend, the author of more than thirty acclaimed books. In this, his final novel, he confronts the legacy of evil, and our unquenchable desire to wrest good from it. One week in late autumn of 1996, a group gathers at the site of a former death camp. They offer prayer at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform. They eat and sleep in the sparse quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews in this camp to their deaths. Clements Olin has joined them, in order to complete his research on the strange suicide of a survivor. As the days pass, tensions both political and personal surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to resolution or healing. Caught in the grip of emotions and impulses of bewildering intensity, Olin is forced to abandon his observer’s role and to bear witness, not only to his family’s ambiguous history but to his own. Profoundly thought-provoking, In Paradise is a fitting coda to the luminous career of a writer who was “for all readers. He was for the world” (National Geographic).

Enables researchers to assess the effects of endocrine disrupters as well as comply with new environmental regulations Endocrine disrupters are chemicals both man-made and natural that interfere with the body''s endocrine system, potentially resulting in adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects. In recent years, a number of regulatory authorities around the world have drafted or enacted legislation that requires the detection and assessment of the effects of endocrine disrupters on both humans and wildlife. In response, this book provides comprehensive, up-to-date information on the latest tested and proven methods used to detect and assess the environmental hazards posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Endocrine Disrupters is divided into chapters covering each major taxon as well as chapters dedicated to hazard assessment and regulation. The book covers testing methods for all the vertebrate groups and several invertebrate phyla, including: Crustaceans and mollusks Insects Fish Amphibians and reptiles Birds and mammals Moreover, the book emphasizes practical, ethical testing methods that combine sensitivity, efficiency, statistical power, and reasonable cost. Each chapter is written by one or more international experts in ecotoxicology, offering readers step-by-step guidance for implementing each method based on the latest research and the authors'' firsthand laboratory experience. Furthermore, all the chapters have been subjected to a rigorous peer review and edited in light of the reviewers'' comments. References at the end of each chapter guide readers to the literature in the field. Endocrine Disrupters is recommended for scientists who need to test chemicals for possible endocrine-disrupting properties. It is also recommended for regulatory authorities who need to decide whether particular chemicals can be safely marketed.

Drawn from fragments of historical fact, Matthiessen''s masterpiece brilliantly depicts the fortunes and misfortunes of Edgar J. Watson, a real-life entrepreneur and outlaw who appeared in the lawless Florida Everglades around the turn of the century.

When his novel Killing Mister Watson was published in 1990, the reviews were extraordinary. It was heralded as "a marvel of invention . . . a virtuoso performance" (The New York Times Book Review) and a "novel [that] stands with the best that our nation has produced as literature" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now Peter Matthiessen brings us the second novel in his Watson trilogy, a project that has been nearly twenty years in the writing. A story of epic scope and ambition, Lost Man''s River confronts the primal relationship between a dangerous father and his desperate sons and the ways in which his death has shaped their lives. Lucius Watson is obsessed with learning the truth about his father. Who was E. J. Watson? Was he a devoted family man, an inspired farmer, a man of progress and vision? Or was he a cold-blooded murderer and amoral opportunist? Were his neighbors driven to kill him out of fear? Or was it envy? And if Watson was a killer, should the neighbors fear the obsessed Lucius when he returns to live among them and ask questions? The characters in this tale are men and women molded by the harsh elements of the Florida Everglades--an isolated breed, descendants of renegades and pioneers, who have only their grit, instinct, and tradition to wield against the obliterating forces of twentieth-century progress: Speck Daniels, moonshiner and alligator poacher turned gunrunner; Sally Brown, who struggles to escape the racism and shame of her local family; R. B. Collins, known as Chicken, crippled by drink and rage, who is the custodian of Watson secrets; Watson Dyer, the unacknowledged namesake with designs on the remote Watson homestead hidden in the wild rivers; and Henry Short, a black man and unwilling member of the group of armed island men who awaited E. J. Watson in the silent twilight. Only a storyteller of Peter Matthiessen''s dazzling artistry could capture the beauty and strangeness of life on this lawless frontier while probing deeply into its underlying tragedy: the brutal destruction of the land in the name of progress, and the racism that infects the heart of New World history.

In the Baliem Valley in central New Guinea lived a Stone Age tribe which survived into the twentieth century - the Kurelu. Matthiessen joined the Harvard-Peabody Expedition of 1961which set out to study the tribe as unobtrusively as possible, living among the Kurelu for two seasons. The result was this classic account, not of the expedition but of a lost culture; the Kurelu''s timeless rhythms of work and play, of warriorship, feasting and funerals. In Under the Mountain Wall Matthiessen illuminates the lives of the Kurelu''s with respect and sympathy, capturing a culture untouched by civilisation and vanishing along with the wilderness lying beneath the dramatic peaks of the Snow Mountains.

Since the 1950s Peter Matthiessen has written fiction and nonfiction of elemental power and moral vision, including the acclaimed novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga and works of naturalism and exploration like the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard. This stunning collection of short stories, available for the first time in paperback, spans more than three decades of writing by one of the most acclaimed literary voices of our time.

Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself to his own violent end at the hands of his neighbours. His son Lucius investigates the killing which has come to obsess him. In this bold new rendering of the Watson trilogy Matthiessen has deepened the insights and motivations of his characters, consolidating his fictional masterwork into a poetic, compelling novel of a monumental scope and ambition, with breathtaking accomplishment.

The journey of Buddhism over centuries, from India to China and then to Japan, is the stuff of mythology. But now, in our own time, we have witnessed and documented its historic crossing of the Pacific and its subsequent evolution in the Americas and Europe. In 1982, writer Peter Muryo Matthiessen, the first dharma successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman, traveled with Glassman to pay respects to the teachers in their lineage, some of the great living Zen masters of twentieth–century Japan. What took place was an important meeting of minds representing the past, present, and future of Zen practice, an intimate connection between ancestors and descendants marking a critical point in the Zen journey from the East to the West. This historic event was captured in the moment by the selective lens of Peter Cunningham. Matthiessen''s exquisite poetic accounts of this pilgrimage, which formed a part of his book Nine–Headed Dragon River, accompany the photos.

From the daily lives of wild herdsmen and the drama of predator kills to the field biologists investigating Africa''s wild creatures and the anthropologists seeking humanity''s origins in the rift valley, this National Book Award finalist is a classic of journalistic observation.

"Matthiessen chronicles two voyages into the frozen seas that surround a landmass larger than the continental United States, most of it buried under eternal snow and ice as much as three miles deep. Ninety percent of the world''s fresh water is locked in this immense ice cap, a remote region profoundly important to our environment. The author addresses the subject with authority and passion, discussing everything from global warming and the ozone layer to the vital role of krill, the teeming crustacean that is the cornerstone of the marine food chain." "Nature lovers - birders especially - will be fascinated by descriptions of more than half of the penguin species and an astonishing array of seabirds, from tiny storm-petrels to magnificent albatrosses, which may soar for years without alighting on land; here too are close encounters with whales, leopard seals, and elephant seals, and elusive creatures such as the oceanic orca. There are also remarkable descriptions of the seldom seen polar rookeries where thousands of emperor penguins stand motionless for months at a time, brooding their giant eggs through the long, cold darkness of Antarctic winter."--BOOK JACKET.

Photographic documentation of the necessity to preserve this precious area.

The story of the threatened Siberian tiger as it struggles to exist in the little-populated Russian Far East.

"Reading this book becomes an act of self-confrontation, for Peter Matthiessen has made it clear that Cesar Chavez''s battle is not only for the agricultural workers but for the redemption of the country. In illuminating the intactness of this one man, Matthiessen provides a measure for the rest of us."—Nat Hentoff

"Watson''s voice is an artistic triumph. . .[Bone by Bone] may well come to be regarded as a classic." --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review In Bone by Bone, Peter Matthiessen speaks in the extraordinary voice of the enigmatic and dangerous E. J. Watson, whom we first saw, obliquely, through the eyes of his early twentieth-century Everglades community in Killing Mister Watson. This astonishing new novel, calling to account the violence, virulent racism, and destruction of the land that fueled the so-called American Dream, points an accusing finger straight into the burning eyes of Uncle Sam. Here is the bloodied child of the Civil War and Reconstruction who dreams of recovering the family plantation. He becomes the gifted cane planter nearing success on a wilderness river when he gives in fatally to his accumulating demons. Powerfully imagined, prodigiously detailed, Bone by Bone is a literary tour de force as bold and ambitious as Watson himself. "Like a true tragic figure, [Watson] knows and understands; he does not wriggle to save his own skin," said The New York Times. "This is a work of genuine dignity."

"Our greatest modern nature writer in the lyrical tradition." --The New York Times Book Review "Matthiessen is a great travel companion. . . . His knowledge of plants, animals and people is breathtaking." --The Boston Globe Perhaps 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.