In comparison to The Snow Leopard, which is marred by botanizing amid Eastern philosophy, Sand Rivers is straightforward. Although the elephant becomes a symbol, Matthiessen resists making it apocalyptic; it represents the primitive majesty of the natural, something that man has destroyed within himself and is rapidly destroying outside himself.

In many travel books the personality of the author is more important than the ostensible subject of the book…. Matthiessen is an ascetic. In attempting to return to the natural or unadorned purity, he has pared his character to the bare bones; and although the safari through the Selous Game Reserve is important for him because he journeys out of our age into a simpler, better time, it would have been more intriguing if Matthiessen were not a true believer. In general ascetics write dull travel books. Spiritual progresses are usually strippings—and after the world, the flesh, and the devil are torn away, little is left that is interesting. The best potential writer of a travel book is the man who indiscriminantly sucks the marrow out of life, not out of a bean pod like Thoreau. Instead of traveling to the heart of darkness to find the light he knows is there, he inhabits the shadows, civilizations between worlds in which contrasts and conflicts are strikingly apparent. The best travel book on Africa in recent years is Edward Hoagland's African Calliope, an account of three months Hoagland spent in the Sudan in 1977. Because he lacks Matthiessen's commitment, Hoagland's vision is not clouded by belief, and his celebration of life in the Sudan with all its horrors and blessings is fascinating.

Matthiessen travels into the Selous Reserve with a former warden Brian Nicholson whom Matthiessen describes in detail and with whom he frequently disagrees. Because Nicholson does not allow Matthiessen to indulge in sentimental primitivism at the start of the safari, there is some conflict. Predictably, however, the dangers of the journey bring warden and writer close together. Days in the bush scratch away the crust which the warden affects in civilization, and eventually he is revealed as a disappointed idealist with a heart as soft as Matthiessen's. Matthiessen tells many good stories about Nicholson, and although he quarrels with Nicholson, he likes and admires him. Nicholson has lived that life beyond convention that Matthiessen envies. (pp. 886-87)

Matthiessen is far better than the common run of writers, and Sand Rivers is a good book. It is filled with entertaining anecdotes; the descriptions of animals are well done, and Matthiessen is probably on the side of the angels in his wish to preserve the Selous Reserve from man's rapacity and the incompetence of the Tanzanian Game Department. Sand Rivers, however, is not extraordinary…. (p. 887)