Lionel Bruno Jordan was murdered on January 20, 1995, in an El Paso parking lot, but he keeps coming back as the key to a multibillion-dollar drug industry, two corrupt governments -- one called the United States and the other Mexico -- and a self-styled War on Drugs that is a fraud. Beneath all the policy statements and bluster of politicians is a real world of lies, pain, and big money. Down by the River is the true narrative of how a murder led one American family into this world and how it all but destroyed them. It is the story of how one Mexican drug leader outfought and outthought the U.S. government, of how major financial institutions were fattened on the drug industry, and how the governments of the U.S. and Mexico buried everything that happened. All this happens down by the river, where the public fictions finally end and the facts read like fiction. This is a remarkable American story about drugs, money, murder, and family.
I believe every sunrise and I remember the smell of wet grass, the color of robins, and rustle of leaves on the big oaks that outlive nations, all this comes with each sunrise." Sonata marks the sixth and final installment of Charles Bowden’s towering “Unnatural History of America” series. While his earlier volumes were suffused with violence and war, Bowden offers here a celebration of rebirth and regrowth. Rendered in Bowden's inimitable style, more prose poetry than reportage, he evokes panoramas that contain the potential for respite and offer a state of grace all but lost in the endless wars of man. Bowden travels back in time to the worlds of artists Francisco Goya and Vincent van Gogh, the latter painting furiously against encroaching madness. “Van Gogh tries to dream a life of color,” writes Bowden. “Powder blue sheds, yellow stubble, pink skies—but the fears and dark things drag him down.” As Bowden’s vivid prose wrestles with the madness of the world, van Gogh’s paintings represent an act of resistance, ultimately unsuccessful, against depression and suicide. Moving from the vibrant hues of van Gogh’s painted gardens to America’s southern border, Bowden returns once more to the Mexican asylum run by "El Pastor," Jose Antonio Galvan, who was first introduced to readers of the sextet in Jericho. Here, too, is the dream of a garden that will be planted in the desert, a promise of regeneration in a world gone mad. Poetic, elegiac, and elliptical, Sonata is the final, captivating book of Bowden’s monumental career.
Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden’s third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden’s growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America’s “New West.” Bowden presents a view of the Southwest that measures how rapid growth takes its toll on the land. Writing with a reporter’s objectivity and a desert rat’s passion, Bowden offers us his trademarked craft and wit to take us into the streets as well as the desert to depict not a fragile environment but the unavoidable reality of abuse, exploitation, and human cruelty. Blue Desert shows us the darker side of development—where “the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land”—and defies us to ignore it. In a thoughtful new foreword, Francisco Cantú writes, “In Blue Desert, we follow Bowden in the processes of becoming. We see the version of Bowden that he would likely most want us to remember—someone who did their best to be an honest witness, someone who was haunted by modernity and his place in it, someone who grappled with his demons by gazing deeply into the desert.” Blue Desert is a critical piece in the oeuvre of Charles Bowden, and it continues to remind readers of the cruelty and beauty of the world around us.
From the introduction to the new edition: “I’ll tell you where I went wrong. The faucet in the kitchen always becomes the reality we believe, and the periodic droughts, one of which for much of the nineties savaged the West, remain a fantasy. This happens each and every day as the water roars from the faucet and the skies remain dangerously blue.” —Charles Bowden In the quarter-century since his first book, Killing the Hidden Waters, was published in 1977, Charles Bowden has become one of the premier writers on the American environment, rousing a generation of readers to both the wonder and the tragedy of humanity’s relationship with the land. Revisiting his earliest work with a new introduction, “What I Learned Watching the Wells Go Down,” Bowden looks back at his first effort to awaken people to the costs and limits of using natural resources through a simple and obvious example—water. He drives home the point that years of droughts, rationing, and even water wars have done nothing to slake the insatiable consumption of water in the American West. Even more timely now than in 1977, Killing the Hidden Waters remains, in Edward Abbey’s words, “the best all-around summary I’ve read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urban-industrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning, and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence, but also the vital, sustaining basis of life everywhere.”
The author is joined by a retired narcotics cop as they investigate the assassination of a drug dealer and hit man outside Tucson, Arizona. One of Charles Bowden’s earliest books, Red Line powerfully conveys a desert civilization careening over the edge―and decaying at its center. Bowden’s quest for the literal and figurative truth behind the assassination of a murderous border-town drug dealer becomes a meditation on the glories of the desert landscape, the squalors of the society that threatens it, and the contradictions inherent in trying to save it. “At its best, Red Line can read like an original synthesis of Peter Matthiessen and William Burroughs . . . A brave and interesting book.” —David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review “Charles Bowden’s Red Line is a look at America through the window of the southwest. His vision is as nasty, peculiar, brutal, as it is intriguing and, perhaps, accurate. Bowden offers consciousness rather than consolation, but in order to do anything about our nightmares we must take a cold look and Red Line casts the coldest eye in recent memory.” —Jim Harrison “The Southwest as portrayed in this Kerouac-esque odyssey betokening the death of the American frontier spirit is a landscape of broken dreams, violence, uprooted lives and fallen idols. . . . Miles distant from tourist-poster images of the Sunbelt, this vista of narrow greed, diminished expectations and despoilation of nature sizzles with the harsh, unrelenting glare of a hyperrealist painting.” —Publishers Weekly
Joey O'Shay is not the real name of the narcotics agent in an unnamed city in the center of the country. But Joey O'Shay exists. The nearly three hundred drug busts he has orchestrated over more than two decades are real, too; if the drug war were a declared war, O'Shay would have a Silver Star. With nerves and mastery worthy of his subject, Charles Bowden follows O'Shay as he sets in motion his latest conquest, a $50 million heroin deal that originates in Colombia and has federal agents sitting at attention from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to New York City. As it unfolds, O'Shay reveals the unerring instinct and ceaseless vigilance that have led him through minefields and brought down kingpins. But now they have led him to a place where it isn't so clear who the heroes are or what the fight has been for. And still the warrior fights on, in a murky and unforgiving landscape readers will not be able to forget.
The acclaimed author of Blue Desert explores life on the arid borderlands of southern Arizona in this “compelling and wonderfully poetic” essay collection (Ron Hansen, New York Times Book Review). In Desierto, Charles Bowden brings his signature eye for vivid detail and penetrating insight to the Sonoran Desert. Travelling across this unforgiving terrain, he explores struggling desert villages, bitter Indian feuds, and a rich history that transcends borders. He profiles notorious predators from mountain lions to drug lords and land barons. Through it all, Bowden offers prescient visions of a future in which the region’s age-old dramas replay themselves long into the future. “In these powerful epic tales of the Sonora Desert, Bowden peoples the harsh land on both sides of the US-Mexican border with saints and sinners, but his enduring hero is the desert itself.” —Kirkus Reviews
Cultivated from the fierce ideas seeded in Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals is an elegiac reflection on death, pain, and a wavering confidence in humanity’s own abilities for self-preservation. After years of reporting on border violence, sex crimes, and the devastation of the land, Bowden struggles to make sense of the many ways in which we destroy ourselves and whether there is any way to survive. Here he confronts a murderer facing execution, sex offenders of the most heinous crimes, a suicidal artist, a prisoner obsessed with painting portraits of presidents, and other people and places that constitute our worst impulses and our worst truths. Painful, heartbreaking, and forewarning, Bowden at once tears us apart and yearns for us to find ourselves back together again.
Through stark observations and visceral experiences, Blood Orchid begins Charles Bowden’s dizzying excavation of the brutal, systemic violence and corruption at the roots of American society. Like a nightmarish fever dream that turns out to be our own reality, Bowden visits dying friends in skid row apartments in Los Angeles, traverses San Francisco byways lined with clubs and joints, and roams through village bars and streets in the Sierra Madre mountains. In these wanderings resides a yearning for the understanding of past and present sins, the human penchant for warfare, abuse, and oppression, and the true war between humanity, the industrialized world, and the immense tolls of our shared land. Deeply personal, hauntingly prophetic, and bracingly sharp, the start to Bowden’s harrowed quest to unearth our ugly truths remains strikingly poignant today.
The third book in Charles Bowden’s “accidental trilogy” that began with Blood Orchid and Blues for Cannibals, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing attempts to resolve the overarching question: “How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death?” As humanity moves further into the twenty-first century, Bowden continues to interrogate our roles in creating the ravaged landscapes and accumulated death that still surround us, as well as his own childhood isolation, his lust for alcohol and women, and his waning hope for a future. We witness post-Katrina New Orleans and terrorist-bombed Bali; we encounter our shared actions with the animal world and the desirous need for consumption; we see the clash and erosion of our physical and figurative borders, the savagery of our own civilization. A man of his time and out of time, Bowden seeks acceptance and a will to endure what may lie ahead.
When Charles Bowden died in 2014, he left behind an archive of unpublished manuscripts. Jericho marks the fifth installment in his venerable “Unnatural History of America” sextet. In it he invokes the cycles of destruction and rebirth that have defined the ancient biblical city over millennia. From the ruins of Jericho’s walls Bowden reflects on the continuum of war and violence—the many conquests of the Americas; the US-Mexican War; the Vietnam War; and the ongoing militarization of our southern border—to argue against the false promise of security that is offered when men “build that wall.” Walls—both real and imagined—will always come tumbling down. Along the way, Bowden tells stories of loss and violence, like that of David Hartley, who mysteriously vanishes on Falcon Lake; of murdered drug runners and their cartel bosses; and of a haunted sicario, or hitman, who is running from his past and compulsively confesses his sins as he searches for an absolution that will never come. Set against these scenes of trauma and violence are Bowden’s gorgeous meditations on nature: dancing cranes, soaring eagles, winding paths that traverse mountains, lakes, and deserts. And threaded throughout are the heroic narratives of men like Martin Luther King Jr., who defied the boundaries that surrounded him and was able to reshape the arc of history. Jericho is a remarkable affirmation of our shared humanity and a timely rejection of violence and nationalism by one of our most prophetic writers working at the height of his powers.
The Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson—whose summit is called Frog Mountain by the Tohono O’odham—offers up to the citizens of the basins below a wilderness in their own backyard. When it was first published in 1987, Frog Mountain Blues documented the creeping sprawl of new development up the Catalinas’ foothills. Today, that development is fully visible, but Charles Bowden’s prescience of the urgency to preserve and protect a sacred recreational space remains as vivid as ever. Accompanied by Jack W. Dykinga’s photographs from the original work, this book continues to convey the natural beauty of the Catalinas and warns readers that this unique wilderness could easily be lost. As Alison Hawthorne Deming writes in the new foreword, “Frog Mountain Blues continues to be an important book for learning to read this place through the eyes of experience and history, and Bowden remains a sobering voice for facing our failures in protecting what we love in this time of global destruction, for taking seriously the power of language to set ourselves right again with the enormous task of living with purpose and presence and care on the land.”
This powerful collaboration between a writer and a photographer puts a human face on the issue of illegal immigration and reveals the harsh realities of migration, journeying to the dangerous border towns and offering portraits of the impoverished men and women desperate to reach the U.S., as well as the real world of illegal immigrants in America.
The author of Blood Orchid and Blue Desert presents a biography on his friend, the writer and environmentalist, Edward Abbey. A passionate advocate for preserving wilderness and fighting the bureaucratic and business forces that would destroy it, Edward Abbey (1927–1989) wrote fierce, polemical books such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang that continue to inspire environmental activists. In this eloquent memoir, his friend and fellow desert rat Charles Bowden reflects on Abbey the man and the writer, offering up thought-provoking, contrarian views of the writing life, literary reputations, and the perverse need of critics to sum up “what he really meant and whether any of it was truly up to snuff.” The Red Caddy is the first literary biography of Abbey in a generation. Refusing to turn him into a desert guru, Bowden instead recalls the wild man in a red Cadillac convertible for whom liberty was life. He describes how Desert Solitaire paradoxically “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground” that Abbey wanted to protect, while sealing his literary reputation and overshadowing the novels that Abbey considered his best books. Bowden also skewers the cottage industry that has grown up around Abbey’s writing, smoothing off its rougher (racist, sexist) edges while seeking “anecdotes, little intimacies . . . pieces of the True Beer Can or True Old Pickup Truck.” Asserting that the real essence of Abbey will always remain unknown and unknowable, The Red Caddy still catches gleams of “the fire that from time to time causes a life to become a conflagration.” “An unflinchingly honest writer addresses the death of his friend and kindred spirit Edward Abbey. . . . This belated publication should not only send readers back to Abbey, but also back to Bowden’s work. A memoir about an American original by an American original, a literary journalist who merits more than a regional readership.” —Kirkus Reviews “Bowden, a journalist and author who died in 2014, knew Abbey better than most, perhaps, and attempts to paint a picture of the southwestern iconoclast in The Red Caddy. Discovered on his computer after his death, it’s a fascinating artifact that’s by turns charming and maddening—just like Abbey himself.” —NPR “With its elegant prose and uncompromising vision, this is vintage Bowden.” —Arizona Daily Star,Southwest Books of the Year
“On a bend, I will see it, a piece of ground off to the side. I will know the feel of this place: the leaves stir slowly on the trees, dry air smells like dust, birds dart and the trails are made by beasts living free.” When award-winning author Charles Bowden died in 2014, he left behind a trove of unpublished manuscripts. Dakotah marks the landmark publication of the first of these texts, and the fourth installment in his acclaimed “Unnatural History of America.” Bowden uses America’s Great Plains as a lens—sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered, but always sharp—for observing pivotal moments in the lives of anguished figures, including himself. In scenes that are by turns wrenching and poetic, Bowden describes the Sioux’s forced migrations and rebellions alongside his own ancestors’ migrations from Europe to Midwestern acres beset by unforgiving winters. He meditates on the life of his resourceful mother and his philosophical father, who rambled between farm communities and city life. Interspersed with these images are clear-eyed, textbook-defying anecdotes about Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and, with equal verve, twentieth-century entertainers “Pee Wee” Russell, Peggy Lee, and other musicians. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey that penetrates the senses and redefines the notion of heartland. Dakotah is a powerful ode to loss from one of our most fiercely independent writers.
A century ago, power on farms was provided by five million heavy horses. They were the pride of rural Britain and the men who worked with them were the elite among farm workers. But today heavy horses are almost a thing of the past. They might be seen in all their glory at agricultural shows decked in glistening harnesses and paraded around the main ring, but generally they are a distant memory. Except for one place: Sillywrea Farm in Northumberland, the last farm in Britain to be worked solely by horses. "The Last Horsemen" is the inspiring story of John Dodd and his family who have lived on Sillywrea for more than 150 years, and for all that time, horses have been the only source of power. Telling the inspirational story of a year in the life of John Dodd, his family, and the farm, this book compellingly evokes the beauty of the countryside. With a farming industry that seems to lurch from crisis to crisis, learning from people who have chosen an alternative way of life becomes ever more important. "The Last Horsemen" is a truly inspirational opportunity to view, first hand, scenes rarely played out in Britain's countryside in the 21st century.
This new collection of short stories by Charles Rose, author of In the Midst of Life: A Hospice Volunteer’s Story, features works previously published in The Sewanee Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Willow Springs, Crazyhorse, The Chattahoochee Review, Alabama Literary Review, Blackbird, and Shenandoah, among others.
Arizona Highways assembled a photographer and two writers, asking each to apply his specialty in relating the Grand Canyon's physical and metaphysical qualities. Their encounters with the Canyon embody decades of experience, and their previous works have garnered awards. The result combines journalistic and impressionistic descriptions, both in words and in photographs.
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