1995
First Published
4.14
Average Rating
298
Number of Pages
In this ground-shaking, breath-taking cri de coeur, Bowden delves with love-driven fury for the roots of our brutal history in this once-brave New World. The figures he casts before us-from Pancho Villa to a modern-day drug lord, from General Sherman to a skid-row Sioux named Robert Sundance-trace a story not so much of rapaciousness as of fear and loathing. Bowden twines it with the natural history of the hammer orchid, a carnivore whose deceptive delicacy comes to stand for the terror and hypocrisy that have perverted our love of the land, its peoples, and our very natures.
Avg Rating
4.14
Number of Ratings
319
5 STARS
45%
4 STARS
34%
3 STARS
15%
2 STARS
3%
1 STARS
3%
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Author
Charles Bowden
Author · 21 books
Charles Bowden was an American non-fiction author, journalist and essayist based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. His journalism appeared regularly in Harper’s GQ, and other national publications. He was the author of several books of nonfiction, including Down by the River. In more than a dozen groundbreaking books and many articles, Charles Bowden 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 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 ).
