Print This Page
First Snow
“First Snow,” New York Times editorial, December 23, 1979, by Alex Shoumatoff
At first, the land seemed barren of color, sound, even life. The crows wheeling.in the slate gray sky contributed nothing, nor did the stark, silent trees, devoid of leaf except for the dry shreds rattling on the beeches. Snapping on skis and gliding into …Read More
Fatal Obsession, The Jungle Death of Diane Fossey
Vanity Fair Magazine,
SEPTEMBER 1986
The rains in Rwanda had let up last December when Dian Fossey was murdered in her cabin in the mountains, but by the time I arrived, a few months later, they were coming down hard, twice a day. The airport at Kigali, the capital, was socked in. Through the ciouds I caught …Read More
The Skipper and the Dam
New Yorker, Dec 1st, 1986
BECAUSE California is such a crazy mosaic of habitats and plant communities, many of the nation’s rarest butterflies are found there. Lange’s metalmark, for instance, a fiery-red variety of the normally orange-and-gray Mormon metalmark, lives on the Antioch Dunes, east of San Francisco, and has a total range of only fifty …Read More
A Reporter At Large (The Ituri Forest)
New Yorker, February 6, 1984
ZAIRE is a big, young, troubled country that takes up almost a million square miles on the western side of sub-Saharan Africa, below the bulge. Formerly called the Belgian Congo, it is eighty times the size of Belgium, whose colony it was until 1960. For the past eighteen years, it has …Read More
A Reporter at Large (The Amazons)
New Yorker, Mar 24, 1986
THE Nhamunda River rises in the mountainous terra incognita of northern Brazil below the Guyana border and, flowing southeast, enters the Amazon River about threequarters of the way down its fourthousand-mile length. Compared with some of the Amazon’s other tributaries, seven of which are over a thousand miles long, the Nhamunda …Read More
A Critic at Large, Henry Walter Bates
New Yorker, Aug 22, 1988
IF I were heading for the Amazon and had room in my tropical kit for just one book, my choice would unquestionably be Henry Walter Bates’s “The Naturalist on the River Amazons.” A hundred and twenty-five years after its first appearance, it remains the basic text, one of the monuments of …Read More
The Mountain of Names
In 1977, a book editor suggested that I write up the history of my family, and I accepted the proposition not only eagerly but with a sense of urgency. My two grandmothers were both nearly ninety. I had heard some of their stories, in bits and pieces -of how they had got out of Russia …Read More
Personal History: Russian Blood, Part 1 Shideyevo
New Yorker, April 26, 1982
In 1820, at the age of thirty-six, Andrei Fyodorovitch Lukianovitch left his regiment (the Hussars) to become the governor of Simbirsk, a sleepy province on the Volga. After six uneventful years there, he retired to his land on the Orel, in the Ukraine, where he built a large house on the …Read More