CURIOUS ANIMAL BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2014 PICK In Paradise tells the story of a group of men and women who come together for a weeklong meditation retreat at the site of a World War II concentration camp, and the grief, rage and upsetting revelations that surface during their time together. Even as it probes the suffering, conflicts, and longings of these diverse characters, In Paradise raises provocative and unanswerable metaphysical questions: what responsibility comes with bearing witness to such cruelty and tragedy; and what insights into the nature of good and evil may be lost in the next decade or two, as the last survivors of - and witnesses to - the death camps pass away. Having participated in three Zen retreats at Auschwitz beginning in the 1990s, Matthiessen had long wished to comment on the ongoing fallout of last century's global catastrophe, but 'as a non-Jewish American journalist, I felt unqualified to do so, I felt I had no right. But approaching it as fiction - as a novelist, an artist - I eventually decided that I did. Only fiction would allow me to probe from a variety of viewpoints the great strangeness of what I had felt.'

An unforgettable spiritual journey through the Himalayas by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), the National Book Award-winning author of the new novel "In Paradise"
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 Zen 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. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by acclaimed travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer.

In Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean, writer, sailor, and surfer Jonathan White takes readers across the globe to discover the science and spirit of ocean tides. In the Arctic, White shimmies under the ice with an Inuit elder to hunt for mussels in the dark cavities left behind at low tide; in China, he races the Silver Dragon, a twenty-five-foot tidal bore that crashes eighty miles up the Qiantang River; in France, he interviews the monks that live in the tide-wrapped monastery of Mont Saint-Michel; in Chile and Scotland, he investigates the growth of tidal power generation; and in Panama and Venice, he delves into how the threat of sea level rise is changing human culture—the very old and very new. Tides combines lyrical prose, colorful adventure travel, and provocative scientific inquiry into the elemental, mysterious paradox that keeps our planet’s waters in constant motion. Photographs, scientific figures, line drawings, and sixteen color photos dramatically illustrate this engaging, expert tour of the tides.

From 1831 to 1837, George Catlin traveled extensively among the native peoples of North America?from the Muskogee and Miccosukee Creeks of the Southeast to the Lakota, Mandan, and Pawnee of the West, and from the Winnebagos and Menominees of the North to the Comanches of eastern Texas. Studying their habits, customs, and modes of life, he made copious notes and numerous sketches of ceremonies, buffalo hunts, symbols, and totems. Catlin's unprecedented fieldwork culminated in more than five hundred oil paintings and his now-legendary journals, which, as Peter Matthiessen writes in his introduction, ?taken together... constitute the first, last, and only ?complete? record of the Plains Indians ever made at the height of their splendid culture, so soon destroyed by traders? liquor and disease, rapine and bayonets.?

African Silences is a powerful and sobering account of the cataclysmic depredation of the African landscape and its wildlife. In this critically acclaimed work Peter Matthiessen explores new terrain on a continent he has written about in two previous books, A Tree Where Man Was Born -- nominated for the National Book Award -- and Sand Rivers.

Through his eyes we see elephants, white rhinos, gorillas, and other endangered creatures of the wild. We share the drama of the journeys themselves, including a hazardous crossing of the continent in a light plane. And along the way, we learn of the human lives oppressed by bankrupt political regimes and economies, and threatened by the slow ecological catastrophe to which they have only begun to awaken.

For environmentally critical times, Courage for the Earth is a centennial appreciation of Rachel Carson's brave life and transformative writing
Rachel Carson's lyrical, popular books about the sea, including her best-selling The Sea Around Us, set a standard for nature writing. By the late 1950s, Carson was the most respected science writer in America.
She completed Silent Spring (1962) against formidable personal odds, and with it shaped a powerful social movement that has altered the course of history. In Silent Spring, Carson asserted that "the right of the citizen to be secure in his own home against the intrusion of poisons applied by other persons" must surely be a basic human right. She was the first to challenge the moral vacuity of a government that refused to take responsibility for or to acknowledge evidence of environmental damage.
In this volume, today's foremost scientists and writers give compelling evidence that Carson's transformative insights -- her courage for the earth -- are giving a new generation of activists the inspiration they need to move consumers, industry, and government to action.
Contributors include John Elder, Al Gore, John Hay, Freeman House, Linda Lear, Robert Michael Pyle, Janisse Ray, Sandra Steingraber, Terry Tempest Williams, and E. O. Wilson

Freshwater field tests are an integral part of the process of hazard assessment of pesticides and other chemicals in the environment. This book brings together international experts on microcosms and mesocosms for a critical appraisal of theory and practice on the subject of freshwater field tests for hazard assessment. It is an authoritative and comprehensive summary of knowledge about freshwater field tests, with particular emphasis on their optimization for scientific and regulatory purposes. This valuable reference covers both lotic and lentic outdoor systems and addresses the choice of endpoints and test methodology. Instructive case histories show how to extrapolate test results to the real world.

'In 1973 [Matthiessen] journeyed with George Schaller, a field biologist, to Crystal Mountain in the Himalayas, to study the wild blue sheep of the region called bharal. They also hoped to see the rare snow leopard, an almost mythical creature which Schaller once glimpsed on a previous visit. Matthiessen is a student of Zen Buddhism and for him this was as much an inner journey as a field trip. He succeeds well in blending the spiritual with the earthly and his book is an evocative account of a remote and timeless place and its people' Sunday Times

Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself to his own violent end at the hands of his neighbours. His son Lucius investigates the killing which has come to obsess him. In this bold new rendering of the Watson trilogy Matthiessen has deepened the insights and motivations of his characters, consolidating his fictional masterwork into a poetic, compelling novel of a monumental scope and ambition, with breathtaking accomplishment.

This volume includes the full Health Technology Assessment (HTA) report on effectiveness, appropriateness, safety and costs of homoeopathy in health care. The report was commissioned by the Swiss health authorities to inform decision-making on the further inclusion of homoeopathy in the list of services covered by statutory health insurance. Other studies carried out as part of the Swiss Complementary Medicine Evaluation Programme (PEK) caused a massive stir due to their schematic and exclusively quantitative (negative-)outcomes for homoeopathy.

The present report, in contrast, offers a differentiated evaluation of the practice of homoeopathy in health care. It confirms homoeopathy as a valuable addition to the conventional medical landscape a status it has been holding for a long time in practical health care.

2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
Peter Matthiessen's great American epic-Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone-was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In "Shadow Country, " he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision.
Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.
"
Shadow Country" traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson's wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."
Peter Matthiessen's lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more."
Praise for" Shadow Country"
""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." -- "The New York Review of Books"
"Magnificent and capacious.... I'll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go. Matthiessen has made his three-part saga into a new thing.... Finally now we have these books welded like a bell, and with Watson's song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate....a breathtaking saga." -- "The Los Angeles Times
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"Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, "Shadow Country" is the exhilarating masterwork of [Matthiessen's] career, every bit as ambitious as "Moby Dick."" -- "National Geographic Adventure" magazine
"Peter Mattiessen consolidates his epic masterpiece of Florida -- and crafts something even better...[He] deserves credit for decades of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed literature....Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel." -- "Miami Herald
"
"Matthiessen is writing about one man's life in "Shadow Country," but he is also writing about the life of the nation over the course of half a century. Watson's story is essentially the story of the American frontier, of the conquering of wild lands and people, and of what such empires cost....Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen's, this is his great book." -- "St. Petersburg Times
"
""Shadow Country" is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of this nation." --"Seattle Times"
"Shadow Country" is an ambitious, lasting, and meaningful work of literature that will not soon fade away. It is a testament to Mr. Matthiessen's integrity as an artist that he felt compelled to return to the Watson material to produce this work and satisfy his original vision....a multifaceted work that can be read variously or simultaneously as a psychological novel, a historical novel, a morality tale, a political allegory, or a mystery. -- "East Hampton Star
""Matthiessen's Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American literature...this reworking...is remarkable....Where Watson was a magnificent character before, he comes across as nothing short of iconic here; it's difficult to find another figure in American literature so thoroughly and confincingly portrayed." -- "Publishers Weekly," starred review, Pick of the Week
"Matthiessen has reinvigorated and rejoined the trilogy's novels...a mosaic about the life and lynch-mob death of a turn-of-the century Florida Everglades sugar planter and serial killer named E. J. Watson -- into the 900-plus-page "Shadow Country." This is no mere repackaging: Four hundred pages were cut from the novels, previous background characters now tromp to the foreground, and the books' rangy, Faulknerian essence is rendered more digestible. Deliciously digestible, that is; this is a thick porterhouse of a novel." -- "Men's Journal"
"The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. SHADOW COUNTRY lives up to anyone's highest expectations for great writing." -- Richard Ford
"Peter Matthiessen is a brilliantly gifted and ambitious writer, an inspired anatomist of the American mythos. His storytelling skills are prodigious and his rapport with his subject is remarkable." -- Joyce Carol Oates
"Peter Matthiessen's work, both in fiction and non-fiction, has become a unique achievement in his own generation and in American literature as a whole. Everything that he has written has been conveyed in his own clear, deeply informed, elegant and powerful prose. The Watson saga-in-the-round, to which he has devoted nearly thirty years, is his crowning achievement. SHADOW COUNTRY, his distillation of the earlier trilogy, is his transmutation of it to represent his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy." -- W.S. Merwin

"From the Hardcover edition."

A balanced, comprehensive overview of Environmental Quality Standards (EQS), Derivation and Use of Environmental Quality and Human Health Standards for Chemical Substances in Water and Soil addresses the selection and prioritization of substances for standard derivation. With integrated content and up-to-date information on assessment of regulations that affect the derivation and use of EQS, it examines the derivation of these standards and their implementation to protect human health and the environment.

The book is based on contributions from thirty-five scientists, regulators, and policy makers from eleven countries with individual expertise across disciplines such as risk assessment, environmental, health, economic, and social sciences. These scientists summarize current knowledge on aquatic and terrestrial environmental quality standards, placing these standards in a wider socioeconomic and regulatory context. The book explains how to derive environmental standards that are defensible from a scientific and socioeconomic perspective. Using multidisciplinary techniques applicable to water, sediments, and soils; the text demonstrates how to select the best form and derivation method relative to individual environmental standards.

The book presents an in-depth examination of when, where, and how to implement environmental standards based on the social and economic context. It includes detailed coverage of technical approaches that shed light on the derivation and implementation of EQSs. It also identifies future research that will help to underpin the science of environmental and human health standards.

A balanced, comprehensive overview of Environmental Quality Standards (EQS), Derivation and Use of Environmental Quality and Human Health Standards for Chemical Substances in Water and Soil addresses the selection and prioritization of substances for standard derivation. With integrated content and up-to-date information on assessment of regulations that affect the derivation and use of EQS, it examines the derivation of these standards and their implementation to protect human health and the environment. The book is based on contributions from thirty-five scientists, regulators, and policy makers from eleven countries with individual expertise across disciplines such as risk assessment, environmental, health, economic, and social sciences. These scientists summarize current knowledge on aquatic and terrestrial environmental quality standards, placing these standards in a wider socioeconomic and regulatory context. The book explains how to derive environmental standards that are defensible from a scientific and socioeconomic perspective. Using multidisciplinary techniques applicable to water, sediments, and soils; the text demonstrates how to select the best form and derivation method relative to individual environmental standards. The book presents an in-depth examination of when, where, and how to implement environmental standards based on the social and economic context. It includes detailed coverage of technical approaches that shed light on the derivation and implementation of EQSs. It also identifies future research that will help to underpin the science of environmental and human health standards.

Since the 1950s Peter Matthiessen has written fiction and nonfiction of elemental power and moral vision, including the acclaimed novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga and works of naturalism and exploration like the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard.

This stunning collection of short stories, available for the first time in paperback, spans more than three decades of writing by one of the most acclaimed literary voices of our time.

In this darkly compelling drama of fathers and sons, land and rapacity, murder, honor, and revenge, an "extraordinarily accomplished writer" (Philadelphia Inquirer) returns to the primeval landscape of the Florida Everglades, the setting of his bestseller Killing Mister Watson.

In 1910 a sugarcane planter named E. J. Watson was gunned down by a group of his neighbors, perhaps in cold blood, perhaps in self-defense. Years later, E.J.'s son Lucius tries to discover the truth of his father's life and death. Yet even as Lucius tries to redeem his half-lost life by gathering the testimony (and braving the threats) of poachers and renegades, he struggles for the future of the remote country in which they live. Beautifully composed, filled with the eerie splendor of an endangered world, Lost Man's River is "a great narrative...with moments of transcendent humor, insight, and love"(Boston Globe).

An eloquent portrayal of a disappearing way of life of the Long Island fishermen whose voices--humorous, bitter and bewildered--are as clear as the threatened beauty of their once quiet shore.

"A giant of a book. Indescribably touching, extraordinarily intelligent."—The Los Angeles Times Book Review. Matthiessen's chronicle of a fatal gun-battle between FBI agents and American Indian Movement activists in 1975.

An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself.

A timeless and majestic portrait of Africa by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), author of the National Book Award-winning "The Snow Leopard" and the new novel "In Paradise"
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 exquisitely combines nature and travel writing to portray the sights, scenes, and people he observed firsthand in several trips over the course of a dozen years. From the daily lives of wild herdsmen and the drama of predator kills to the field biologists investigating wild creatures and the anthropologists seeking humanity's origins in the rift valley, "The Tree Where Man Was Born" is a classic of journalistic observation. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by groundbreaking British primatologist Jane Goodall.

In the summer of 1968 Peter Matthiessen met Cesar Chavez for the first time. They were the same age: forty-one. Matthiessen lived in New York City, while Chavez lived in the Central Valley farm town of Delano, where the grape strike was unfolding. This book is Matthiessen's panoramic yet finely detailed account of the three years he spent working and traveling with Chavez, including to Sal Si Puedes, the San Jose barrio where Chavez began his organizing. Matthiessen provides a candid look into the many sides of this enigmatic and charismatic leader who lived by the laws of nonviolence.
Sal Si Puedes is less reportage than living history. In its pages a whole era comes alive: the Chicano, Black Power, and antiwar movements; the browning of the labor movement; Chavez's fasts; the nationwide boycott of California grapes. When Chavez died in 1993, tens of thousands gathered at his funeral. It was a clear sign of how beloved he was and how important his life had been.
A new foreword by Marc Grossman considers the significance of Chavez's legacy for our time. As well as serving as an indispensable guide to the 1960s, this book rejuvenates the extraordinary vitality of Chavez's life and spirit, giving his message a renewed and much-needed urgency.

It is little known that the Revolutionary War and the writing of the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights were strongly influenced by Native American traditions. European philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Jean Jacques Rousseau had begun pressing for democratic reforms in Europe on the basis of glowing reports by early settlers about the New World and its native inhabitants. The founding fathers of the United States, in turn, were inspired to fight for independence and to create the great American documents of freedom through contact with Native American statesmen and exposure to American Indian societies based on individual freedom, representative government and the democratic union of tribes. Yet American Indians have never been acknowledged for their many contributions to the founding of the United States of America, and they have never been permitted to fully share the benefits of the freedoms they helped establish. Exiled in the Land of the Free is a dramatic recounting of early American history and an eloquent call for reform that will not be ignored. Written by eight prominent Native American leaders and scholars, each a specialist in his area of expertise, Exiled in the Land of the Free: Democracy, Indian Nations and the U. S. Constitution is a landmark volume, sure to be read by generations to come. An aspect of American history that has been ignored and denied for centuries is the extent to which we are indebted to Native Americans for the principles and practices on which our democratic institutions are based. This is the first work to recognize that legacy and trace our model of participatory democracy to its Native American roots. This book, which was written into the Congressional Record, has major implications for future relations between Indian tribes and the governments of the United States and other nations. It presents the strongest case ever made for Native American sovereignty. American history has finally been written--not from the European point of view--but from an Indian perspective. Exiled in the Land of the Free has been adopted for courses in twelve universities, to date.

Bestselling author Peter Matthiessen takes readers on an expedition to find the most dangerous predator on Earth--the legendary great white shark. On a trek that lasts 17 months and takes him from the Caribbean to the whaling grounds off South Africa, across the Indian Ocean to the South Australian coast, Matthiessen records the beauties of strange seas and landscapes and encounters with sharks and other sea life.