Archive for the ‘National Book Award’ Category
SHADOW COUNTRY by Peter Matthiessen
I’ve been concerned about reviewing SHADOW COUNTRY from the get go. For starters, it is big at eight hundred and ninety-two pages. Getting one’s head around all those words is, plain and simple, challenging. And then there is the longevity involved, for lack of a better word. Matthiessen confesses at the outset that his first notes on the work, “to my horror date back to 1978.” That is a long time to invest in a project and the reviewer wants to do it justice. And there is the subject matter: Nothing less than a reckoning of the “last American frontier,” the turn of the century coast of southwest Florida, the Ten Thousand Islands, as reflected through the experience of a single, highly complex, enigmatic figure, Edgar J. Watson.
July 20, 2009
Tags: Real Event Fiction Posted in: 19th Century, Award Winning Author, Historical Perspective, National Book Award, Wild West 
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