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Shop nowThe Tree Where Man Was Born
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Learn moreIn 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.
Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) was the author of more than thirty books, including the New York Times bestseller The Snow Leopard. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1974. He was cofounder of the Paris Review and won two National Book Awards, the 2000 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, and the 2010 Spiros Vergos Prize for Freedom of Expression.
Dion Graham is an award-winning narrator named a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine. He has been a recipient of the prestigious Audie Award numerous times, as well as Earphones Awards, the Publishers Weekly Listen Up Awards, IBPA Ben Franklin Awards, and the ALA Odyssey Award. He was nominated in 2015 for a Voice Arts Award for Outstanding Narration. He is also a critically acclaimed actor who he has performed on Broadway, off Broadway, internationally, in films, and in several hit television series. He is a graduate of Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, with an MFA degree in acting.
Reviews
“Entwined with...curiosity about the dim past is Mr. Matthiessen’s second and to me more engrossing theme: his observations of the natives, the landscape, the wildlife he encountered....[Eliot Porter’s] sense of composition is flawless...Taken together these two artists have discovered for me an Africa I have never seen or properly appreciated before.”
“Stunning…The Africa [Matthiessen] evokes is finally timeless, majestic, throbbing with life, indivisible.”
“Dion Graham’s deep voice adds a poetic quality to the author’s descriptive writing as he talks about watching wild elephants or buffalo. Graham also brings life to Matthiessen’s meetings with Africans and Europeans.”
“The lush prose casts its own spell on a landscape observed with awe and inexplicable sadness…[Matthiessen’s] narrative powers are considerable.”
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