THE SNOW LEOPARD by Peter Matthiessen; Viking; 400 pages; $12.95
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.
In his factual The Cloud Forest (1961) and the fictional At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), Matthiessen and his characters successfully, and at times beautifully, conveyed the dilemma of the Western mind: a need to worship wilderness and a desire to...