Under The Mountain Wall

Description

'Matthiessen is a talented writer and imaginative traveller and a man of true originality' Independent In the Baliem Valley in central New Guinea lived a Stone Age tribe which survived into the twentieth century - the Kurelu. Matthiessen joined the Harvard-Peabody Expedition of 1961which set out to study the tribe as unobtrusively as possible, living among the Kurelu for two seasons. The result was this classic account, not of the expedition but of a lost culture; the Kurelu's timeless rhythms of work and play, of warriorship, feasting and funerals. In Under the Mountain Wall Matthiessen illuminates the lives of the Kurelu's with respect and sympathy, capturing a culture untouched by civilisation and vanishing along with the wilderness lying beneath the dramatic peaks of the Snow Mountains.

Peter Matthiessen was a naturalist, explorer and writer. His works of fiction include At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Far Tortuga and the acclaimed 'Watson Trilogy'. His explorations resulted in many fine works of non-fiction, among them The Snow Leopard, The Cloud Forest and The Tree where Man was Born. He died in 2014, aged 86.

Peter Matthiessen is an original and powerful artist who has produced as impressive a body of work as that of any writer of our time. Both as a novelist and as a naturalist he has immeasurably enlarged our consciousness Matthiessen-is a writer of great integrity, who lives the life he writes, and yet whose scathing critique of our all-consuming, all-exploiting society is also realistic * Scotland on Sunday * Our greatest modern nature writer in the lyrical tradition