African Silences – Peter Matthiessen | Voyager Rare Books Maps & Prints

Product Categories

African Silences – Peter Matthiessen

Short Description

A super narrative that combines a West African wildlife trip of 1978 {Gambia, Ivory Coast etc} with a Forest Elephant Survey in the broader Congo Basin {Gabon, Congo, Zaire, Kenya} in 1980.

Published by Random House, New York in 1991. Octavo, 225 pages, end paper maps of the travels. Very good condition, good dust jacket over an elaborate binding with quarter green cloth and parchment like paper with delightful embossed pygmy elephant motif.

The author is a great writer {author of the Snow Leopard etc} but as usual he forgot to take his camera. This is a disappointment considering his subject matter and the search for the elusive pygmy elephant.

The second adventure dominates the book and they both contain good detail of the goings on surrounding the trip – the scariest light aircraft experiences imaginable. The Forest Elephant survey was truly important because at that time the poachers had moved into the jungle and were taking large numbers of elephant down for the ivory – the rate was predicted to be fatal to the elephant without a proper scientific census on number – still not sure.

Matthiessen in Africa searching for the pygmy elephants - good content -

Updating...