Greedy Reader Meeting This Afternoon in the Santa Fe College Library
July 26, 2016
Its time for another Greedy Reader session! Meetings are held the last Tuesday of the month (except December) at 2:00 p.m. in the Lawrence W. Tyree Library Conference Room (Y-102). The book for July is Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. Take a break and come join the group for a lively discussion. Even if you haven't read the book, come see what the group is all about. Perhaps you will become a new attendee of the monthly group!
See video of author Peter Matthiessen accepting award, 2008 National Book Award Winner for Fiction: //www.nationalbook.org/nba2008_f_matthiessen.html - .V5ZlfZMrJBw
From the Publisher:
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."
