About this item
A New York Times Bestseller A National Book Award-winning Author In 1996, more than a hundred people gather at the site of a former death camp. They offer prayer and witness at the crematoria and meditate on the selection platform. They eat and sleep in the Nazi officers' quarters. They are joined by an American academic of Polish descent, there to complete research on the suicide of a survivor. As the days pass, tensions surface among the participants, stripping away any easy pretense to resolution or healing.
About the Author
Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 - April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer and CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was a 2008 National Book Award winner. He was also a prominent environmental activist. His nonfiction featured nature and travel, notably The Snow Leopard (1978) and American Indian issues and history, such as a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) . His fiction was adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) by Luis Buñuel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film of the same name.In 2008, at age 81, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction for Shadow Country, a one-volume, 890-page revision of his three novels set in frontier Florida that had been published in the 1990s. According to critic Michael Dirda, "No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops, savannas, and the sea."Matthiessen was treated for acute leukemia for more than a year. His death came as he awaited publication of his final novel, In Paradise on April 8. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Melissa Eagan, WNYC New York Public Radio (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wnyc/2565449584/) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ], via Wikimedia Commons.