Synopses & Reviews
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).
In this seminal book, Bowden turns his fearless gaze toward the future, the future we can feel hurtling toward us as fuel reserves dwindle, species die out, terrorism flourishes, the Earth warms, and our ability to be fully awake — alert and impassioned in our lives — wanes. Weaving together natural history, memoir, reportage, and sheer virtuosic writing, he takes us on a furious tour of our emerging reality, his observations from the borderlands — of nations, laws, species, and desire — all the more searing for his refusal to be our scourge.
Bowden has always had the gift of prophecy, but Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing is proof that the times have caught up with his vision. We need that vision now more than ever.
Review
"Bowden is a blood-and-guts journalist with a poets sensibility, a noirish naturalist, a ferociously inquisitive witness to lifes glory and horror torn between the desire to embrace the world and the need to hole up in a drapes-drawn motel room...Writing with molten urgency, confessional magnetism, and piercing detail, Bowden chronicles his unlikely friendships with a rattlesnake and a desert tortoise, enigmatic encounters with women, the psychic repercussions of his murder investigations, and his part in a terrifying Greenpeace mission. Red wine, Moby Dick, human brutality, the suffering of other species, the obdurateness of paradox, the ambush of love, beauty beyond comprehension, the immensity of loss implicit in our planetary crimes--Bowden, singing in chains, says yes to all of life."
Synopsis
In Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing, Bowden continues the quest he first set out on--or rather, that grabbed him by the throat and hasn't yet let him go--in the 1995 Blood Orchid ("a first-rate eye-opener to 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). Where Blood Orchid cast an eye back over the American past, retelling the history of our love affair with violence in Bowden's incantatory, near-hallucinatory voice, Blues for Cannibals turned to the present, tracing the "soul-sickness" underlying our present malaise. Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing continues the mission of this "accidental trilogy," trawling south of the border--a country Bowden's journalism has stamped as his own--and far afield, to post-terrorism Bali and back again to the deserts of the Southwest, where he writes from the point of view of a rattlesnake, and into the wells of memoir, the perspectives coiling back upon themselves to make "a kind of record of our deep hungers, our deep hungers, our deep appetite for homicide, and our endless emptiness as we prowl the midnight streets looking for that thing we are certain will fix us."
Synopsis
The author of "Blood Orchid" and "Blues for Cannibals" concludes his "accidental trilogy" with this work that offers a fearless look into Earth's seemingly doomed future.
Synopsis
PRAISE FOR
A SHADOW IN THE CITY "A truly gripping narrative."
San Francisco Bay Guardian PRAISE FOR DOWN BY THE RIVER "Brutal and brilliantly reported . . . Remarkably vivid . . . [Bowden] captures the way greed, ethnicity, and an old-school emphasis on honor interact to create a world in which violence is the only constant."- The New Yorker PRAISE FOR BLOOD ORCHID
"Blood Orchid is its own trip, brilliant . . . always compelling. Bowden says what he means, hang the consequences. He is becoming one of our most important voices in the so-called New West." William KittredgeLos Angeles Times PRAISE FOR BLUES FOR CANNIBALS
"[Bowden is a] . . . thrillingly good writer whose grandness of vision is only heightened by the bleak originality of his voice." Ron Hansen The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
CHARLES BOWDEN is a writer whose work appears regularly in Harper's, GQ, and other national publications. He is the author of several previous books of nonfiction, including Down by the River. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.