false 47385 2 0
In more than a dozen groundbreaking books and many articles, Charles Bowden has blazed a trail of fire from the deserts of the Southwest to the centers of power where abstract ideas of human nature hold sway — and to the roiling places that give such ideas the lie. He has claimed as his turf "our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox (all of them) books about America" (Jim Harrison, on Blood Orchid ). ]]> male 1945/01/01 82957 0743244575 9780743244572 20 <![CDATA[Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171033732m/82957.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171033732s/82957.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82957.Down_by_the_River_Drugs_Money_Murder_and_Family 4.09 88 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.]]> 47385 3.94 343 54 2002 297930 0865476292 9780865476295 12 <![CDATA[Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173496753m/297930.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173496753s/297930.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/297930.Blood_Orchid_An_Unnatural_History_of_America 3.90 59 ]]> 47385 3.94 343 54 1995 315995 0865476535 9780865476530 4 <![CDATA[Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173709447m/315995.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173709447s/315995.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/315995.Blues_for_Cannibals_The_Notes_from_Underground 4.00 32 Blues for Cannibals continues the quest Bowden began in Blood Orchid-to discover the headwaters of the sickness that seeps through the American soul, and to consider what it might mean to come fully alive in a time of exalted consumption, global pillage, gated communities, and wholesale destruction of the environment. Down, down he leads us, in intoxicating, nearly hallucinogenic prose-past the Yaqui, the Anasazi, and other ghosts of our collective history, past the hookers, winos, and assorted have-nots outside the prosperous circle by the fire. We meet a prisoner obsessed with painting presidents, sex offenders whose desires are not as alien as we wish, a murderer whose execution does not cure what ails us. "I wound up looking at a world where cannibalism is life," Bowden writes, "and of course, given the diet, a life without a future." He mourns a young artist who couldn't find a reason to keep living and tends a mesquite tree that won't die. And down among its metaphoric roots, he reacquaints us with the appetites-fierce, flawed, human-that might save us too. Blues for Cannibals is scripture for an age when bushes no longer burn.
</div>]]> 47385 3.94 343 54 2002 1040606 0816510814 9780816510818 2 <![CDATA[Blue Desert]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180444981m/1040606.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1180444981s/1040606.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1040606.Blue_Desert 3.87 31 In the promised land of the Sunbelt, people come by the thousands to escape the crush of Eastern cities and end up duplicating the very world they have fled. Can the land remain unchanged? In Blue Desert, Charles Bowden presents a view of the Southwest that seeks to measure how rapid growth has taken its toll on the land. Writing with a reporter's objectivity and a desert rat's passion, Bowden takes 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 Sunbelt's darker side as it has developed in recent times—where "the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land"—and defies us to ignore it. Blue Desert has no boundaries, no terrain, no topographical coordinates; it is a state of mind inescapable to one who sees change and knows that nothing can be done to stop it.]]> 47385 3.94 343 54 1988 297926 0292743068 9780292743069 1 <![CDATA[Killing the Hidden Waters]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173496752m/297926.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173496752s/297926.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/297926.Killing_the_Hidden_Waters 4.10 20 From reviews of the first edition:

<p class="quote"> "This slender book brims with wisdom and scholarship." <p class="source">—Harold Scarlett, <cite>Houston Post <p class="quote">"Charles Bowden's <cite>Killing the Hidden Waters is the best all-around summary I've read yet, anywhere, of how our greed-driven, ever-expanding urbanindustrial empire is consuming, wasting, poisoning and destroying not only the resource basis of its own existence but also the vital, sustaining basis of all life everywhere. This one little book tells the whole story. In my opinion, Charles Bowden is the bcst social critic and environmental journalist now working in the Amcrican southwest, a sharp and engaging writer who never lets his cool disgust at our collective stupidity erode his fundamental sympathy for thc actual living, breathing, still hopeful human beings who inhabit this besieged land. I salute him, and I wish him a million readers." <p class="source">—Edward Abbey, author of <cite>Beyond the Wall and other books

From the introduction to the new edition:

<p class="quote"> "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." <p class="source"> —Charles Bowden

In the quarter-century since his first book, <cite>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, <cite>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."

]]> 47385 3.94 343 54 1978 252047 0893817767 9780893817763 3 <![CDATA[Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173152027m/252047.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173152027s/252047.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/252047.Juarez_The_Laboratory_of_Our_Future 4.06 18 Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Time challenges the propaganda and the realities of the current relationship between the United States and Mexico, focusing on the more intimate connection between the border towns of El Paso and Juarez. Charles Bowden, who first brought attention to the story of the Juarez photographers in Harper's (December 1996), has written an uncompromising, piercing work that combines insightful and informed reporting with a poetic and wry style. His powerful text, integrated with brutal and revealing images by a group of unknown Mexican street photographers, takes on issues of NAFTA, immigration, gangs, corruption, drug trafficking, and poverty, uncovering a very different Mexico than generally depicted in the press and by the United States and Mexican governments.

Conditions in the impoverished colonias (urban settlements), work on maquiladora (foreign-owned factory) assembly lines, arrests and victims resulting from drug and gang violence, the hardships for women and children-- in short, everyday life in Juarez-- are all depicted here with an urgency and passion that could only grow from pure desperation. This group of guerrilla photographers, most of whom work for one of the daily newspapers in Juarez, earning the equivalent of only $50 to $100 per week (although the cost of living in Juarez is nearly that of El Paso), risk their lives daily with the photographs they take, alienating themselves from the local governments in both Juarez and El Paso, the police, the drug traffickers, and the gangs.

It is all too easy for the American media (and, consequently, the American public) to ignore the plight of the almost two million residents of a city seemingly so distant and foreign, yet the brutal irony is that many of these people-- our not-so-distant neighbors-- suffer directly from the effects of our "progress." Many Mexicans continue to work in subhuman conditions, with little hope of lifting themselves out of grinding poverty.

While Charles Bowden presents a riveting investigation of Juarez, its inhabitants, and its visual chroniclers, the renowned activist and writer Noam Chomsky offers in his introduction a bitingly critical account of NAFTA, suggesting its nullifying effect on democracy and the rights of both workers and consumers, and its underlying strategy for protecting the rich and powerful, and keeping everyone else in his or her place. In his afterword, the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano poses the question: Should the Third World really aspire to be more like the First World? His insider's look at contemporary North/South American relations reveals how the relationship between Juarez and El Paso can serve as a metaphor for U.S.-Latin American relations, and demonstrates the devastating toll United States policy and attitude knowingly take on human rights and the environment south of our border.
</div>]]> 47385 3.94 343 54 1998 297927 0156032538 9780156032537 2 <![CDATA[A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173496752m/297927.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173496752s/297927.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/297927.A_Shadow_in_the_City_Confessions_of_an_Undercover_Drug_Warrior 3.67 18
Charles Bowden, author of the critically acclaimed Down by the River, follows O'Shay as he sets the deal in motion. A Shadow in the City confirms Bowden's reputation as a bold, genre-bending chronicler of the underworld.
</div>]]> 47385 3.94 343 54 2006 943195 0393029352 9780393029352 1 <![CDATA[Desierto: Memories of the Future]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/943195.Desierto_Memories_of_the_Future 3.57 14 47385 3.94 343 54 1991 6024294 0151013950 9780151013951 3 <![CDATA[Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/60/294/6024294-m-1255574010.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/60/294/6024294-s-1255574010.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6024294.Some_of_the_Dead_Are_Still_Breathing_Living_in_the_Future 3.20 10 47385 3.94 343 54 2009 2987565 0140145486 9780140145489 0 <![CDATA[Red Line]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2987565.Red_Line 3.25 8 47385 3.94 343 54 1989