Trinity
2009
First Published
4.33
Average Rating
272
Number of Pages
Part of Series
The Southwestern desert—that tumultuous "zone claimed by two nations, and controlled by no one"—is Charles Bowden's home and enduring passion. In acclaimed books ranging from A Shadow in the Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior and Down by the Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family to Inferno and Exodus/Éxodo, Bowden has written eloquently about issues that plague the border region—the smuggling of drugs and people and the violence that accompanies it, the rape of the environment and the greed that drives it. Completing a trilogy that includes Inferno and Exodus/Éxodo, Bowden looks back in Trinity across centuries of human history in the border region to offer his most encompassing and damning indictment of "the murder of the earth all around me." Sparing no one, Bowden recounts how everyone who has laid claim to the Southwestern desert—Native Americans, Spain, Mexico, and the United States—has attempted to control and domesticate this ecologically fragile region, often with devastating consequences. He reserves special scorn for the U.S. government, whose attempts at control have provoked consequences ranging from the massive land grab of the Mexican War in the nineteenth century, to the nuclear fallout of the first atomic bomb test in the twentieth century, to the police state that is currently growing up around attempts to seal the border and fight terrorism. Providing a stunning visual counterpoint to Bowden's words, Michael Berman's photographs of the desert reveal both its harsh beauty and the scars it bears after centuries of human abuse. Bowden's clearest warning yet about the perils facing the desert he calls home, Trinity confirms that, in his words, "the [border] zone is a laboratory where the delusions of life—economic, religious, military, foreign policy, biological, and agricultural—can be tested. This time the edge is the center, this time the edge is the face of the future."
Avg Rating
4.33
Number of Ratings
6
5 STARS
50%
4 STARS
33%
3 STARS
17%
2 STARS
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Author
Charles Bowden
Author · 24 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 ).
