Word: leopards
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...SNOW LEOPARD by Peter Matthiessen; Viking; 400 pages...
Till now Peter Matthiessen's readers have known him primarily as a novelist, a naturalist and a travel writer. The Snow Leopard reveals a more private Matthiessen, a 51-year-old widower searching for peace of mind and, of course, material for a book...
...explored and written about the Amazon, North America and Africa. The Caribbean was the stage for his 1975 poetic narrative of turtle fishermen, Far Tortuga. His latest work, The Snow Leopard, springs from a 250-mile hike that he and Field Biologist George Schaller made five years ago in the Himalayas. Schaller (The Mountain Gorilla, The Serengeti Lion) pushed tirelessly through icy passes and over the Tibetan plateau to observe the rutting habits of the bharal, a wild goatlike animal better known as the blue sheep. He also hoped for a glimpse of the snow leopard, a creature so rare...
...Snow Leopard has a number of overlapping parts. There are the geographic, social and natural histories of the Himalayas, along with the day-by-day accounts of the journey: trekking in sun, rain, wind and snow; sleeping night after night in a leaky one-man tent; existing on a crude, monotonous diet; dealing with reluctant porters; avoiding the snarling village mastiffs; living with the long silences and terse exchanges on the trail; and the flora, fauna and overwhelming vistas of peaks and valleys at the top of the world. There are frequent outcroppings of autobiography as Matthiessen, scion...
...coal and collected more than $50 million, which he used to build an even more prosperous empire based on petrochemicals, paper, steel-and Daimler-Benz stock. Today the Flick Group is a $4-billion-a-year conglomerate of some 100 companies that make products as diverse as bathtubs and Leopard tanks for the Bundeswehr. After Papa died...