The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes
Peter Matthiessen
Illustrated by Robert Bateman
"Cranes?!" a woman once squawked to celebrated novelist and nature writer Peter Matthiessen. "Who cares about cranes?" Well, Matthiessen, for one, and his fellow "craniacs" and pretty much anyone else who reads the author’s eloquent and spiritual testimonial, The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes (North Point Press, $27.50), illustrated by Robert Bateman. Matthiessen has trundled from Siberia to Africa to Nebraska’s Platte River in pursuit of his beloved birds and has found that, "perhaps more than any other living creatures," cranes "evoke the retreating wilderness, the vanishing horizons of clean water, earth, and air upon which their species —and ours, too, though we learn it very late—must ultimately depend for survival."
— Louis Bayard
