Audiobooks by Peter Matthiessen

El leopardo de las nieves (The Snow Leopard)

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

Jose Luis Lopez Munoz, Peter Matthiessen (Author), Sergio Mejía (Narrator)

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In Paradise: A Novel

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.

Peter Matthiessen (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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The Snow Leopard

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 Z en 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.

Peter Matthiessen (Author), Peter Matthiessen (Narrator)

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Killing Mr. Watson

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.

Peter Matthiessen (Author), Barbara Rosenblat, George Guidall, Mark Hammer, Norman Dietz (Narrator)

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The Tree Where Man Was Born

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. 'Stunning'.The Africa [Matthiessen] evokes is finally timeless, majestic, throbbing with life, indivisible.''Saturday Review

Peter Matthiessen (Author), Dion Graham (Narrator)

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At Play in the Fields of the Lord

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 the behalf of the local comandante. 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. 'Inventive and extremely well-written'incredibly moving and disturbing'a remarkable performance.''San Francisco Chronicle

Peter Matthiessen (Author), Anthony Heald (Narrator)

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Lost Man's River

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.

Peter Matthiessen (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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Tigers in the Snow

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.

Peter Matthiessen (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness

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.

Peter Matthiessen (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

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In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

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. Behind this violent chain of events lie issues of great complexity and profound historical resonance, brilliantly explicated by Peter Matthiessen in this controversial book. "A giant of a book....Indescribably touching, extraordinarily intelligent."-Los Angeles Times Review

Peter Matthiessen (Author), Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

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Shadow Country: A New Rendering of the Watson Legend

Winner of the 2008 National Book Award for Fiction. Winner of the Publishers Weekly Listen Up Award 2009. Shadow Country is Peter Matthiessen's re-imagining of the legend of E. J. Watson, the Everglades sugar 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. Originally written as three separate, acclaimed novels, Shadow Country 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. "Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature. This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably, Faulkner. In every way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once history, fiction, and myth-as well as the capstone to the career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our time."-New York Review of Books

Peter Matthiessen (Author), Anthony Heald (Narrator)

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At Play in the Fields of the Lord

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.

Peter Matthiessen (Author), George Guidall (Narrator)

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