Anne Matthews is a contributing editor for Preservation Magazine, and her articles have appeared in The New York Times and other publications. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey
North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001
WILD NIGHTS: NATURE RETURNS TO THE CITY
“WILD NIGHTS is a keeper…[a book] that changed the way I see the world I live in.”
—USA Today
A walk on New York City’s truly wild side — and a glimpse of the landscape of the future.
Deer in Manhattan, coyotes in the Bronx, wild turkeys flying down Broadway: among the traffic and tall buildings of America’s most urban terrain, another city — suppressed and segregated during daylight, exceedingly lively from twilight to dawn — has begun to stake a new claim. WILD NIGHTS takes a startling tour of this other New York, revealing how stubbornly nature reasserts itself in even the most violently resculpted terrain.
In the first urban period in human history, confrontation and competition with the natural world is becoming an everyday occurrence. Some encounters charm us; some we dread; some we badly misunderstand. Anne Matthews explores the implications of this unexpected and powerful resurgence of nature for the fate of a world of megacities and suburban hypersprawl. Animated by her keen wit and eye, and anatomized by the often warring theories of scientists, historians, and environmentalists, New York emerges as a case study in civilization on the brink of ecological overreach.
BUY THE BOOK
University of Chicago Press, 1997
BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS: INSIDE THE AMERICAN COLLEGE TODAY
“A wide-ranging, well-written and lively account of contemporary academia.”
—Christian Wiman, Dallas Morning News
As the price of higher education escalates and the number of Americans seeking a college degree steadily rises, it is now more important then ever to think about higher education in a different way. In BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS, Anne Matthews paints a provocative yet evenhanded portrait of the American campus. With each chapter dedicated to sections of the academic year, Matthews puts students, professors, and administrators under the magnifying glass. She conducts her investigation in four-year universities all across the country, from enormous state schools like the University of Texas to specialized colleges like Cal Tech. BRIGHT COLLEGE YEARS is a fascinating look at the changing face of the American university that will be of interest to prospective students, their parents, and anyone interested in higher education.
BUY THE BOOK
University of Chicago Press, 1992
WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM: RESTORING AMERICA’S GREAT PLAINS
“A priceless piece of Americana.”
—Boston Globe
In 1987 Frank and Deborah Popper proposed a bold solution to the decline of America’s Great Plains: create a vast nature preserve by returning 139,000 square miles in ten states to prairie and reintroducing the buffalo that once roamed there. In WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM, Anne Matthews follows the Poppers from Montana to Texas as they try to sell their idea called the Buffalo Commons; in the process, she introduces us to the people who love these arid windswept lands.
This edition includes a new foreword by environmental historian Donald Worster. Matthews’s new afterword describes how with growing support from Native Americans and private groups like the Nature Conservancy, the Poppers’ dream of a Buffalo Commons is becoming a reality.