Reader’s Corner

If the best writing doesn’t flinch, reading Charles Bowden is to have your eyelids pulled back. The writer whom Edward Abby called “the best social critic and environmental journalist now working in the American Southwest,” has been walking both sides of the roiling U.S./Mexican border for decades,  staring hard at the drives and appetites that give rise to our hot, turbulent planet. A rangy collection of book excerpts, magazine features, and newspaper articles, The Charles Bowden Reader is, as far as I can tell, the single best cross section of this writer’s work out there today. Whether the subject is a body dead and folded on the street in Ciudad Juarez or the strange companionship of a rattlesnake, the guy does not flinch. Look, he says, here’s the deal: “[The world] can only be saved by appetite and appetite of one kind is what is killing it, the appetite to possess things. And the lack of appetite of another kind, the appetite to feel things, is what is killing it.” Find a copy of this book, pour yourself some coffee, and buckle up.

Bowden was winner of the 2010 Orion Book Award.

You might also enjoy the 11 minute video interview with Mr. Bowden.

The Charles Bowden Reader
Edited by Erin Almeranti & Mary Martha Miles
Foreword by Jim Harrison
University of Texas Press, 2010
Paperback, $24.95 ($16.47 from Amazon)