SAND RIVERS; photographs by Hugo van Lawick

New York: The Viking Press, 1981. First Edition, First Printing. Cloth. Fine/Fine. Hugo van Lawick photographer. Small 4to (10 1/8" x 7 1/4"), white buckram with blue title & red-brown author-&-photographer credits on spine, Mylar-protected full-color photographic dust jacket (unclipped) by Hugo van Lawick, profusely illustrated with many full-color and fewer B&W, full-page glossy photographs by Hugo van Lawick, map endpapers, [viii] + 213 pages. Matthiessen's skillful nature writing combines handsomely with Lawick's superb full-color wildlife photography in this account of their 1979 safari into the Selous Game Reserve of Southern Tanzania: one of the less well known and largest wildlife preserves in Africa. <br/> <br/> Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher, and environmental activist. A co-founder of The Paris Review, he won the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction. <br/> <br/> Matthiessen's nonfiction featured nature and travel, notably The Snow Leopard (1978), SAND RIVERS (1981); 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). <br/> <br/> His fiction was adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film.<br/> <br/> In 2008, at age 81, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction for Shadow Country, a one-volume revision of his three novels set in frontier Florida published in the 1990s.<br/> <br/> He died on April 5, 2014, three days before publication of his final novel, In Paradise.<br/> <br/> (With the continuous slaughter of "big game" and encroachments by local peoples that has occurred in Southern Africa since this book was published, one hopes this reserve has been largely preserved.)<br/> <br/> EXCEPTIONAL CONDITION internally & externally! Tight, bright, clean, without foxing, price-clipping, or remainder marks.