Blue Desert

by Charles Bowden

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Essays, Environment, Ecology, History, Journalism

179 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1986

About the author

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 ).

Reviews

[Daniel Villines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blue Desert is a series of articles or sketches written by Bowden as a means of honoring the desert of the southwestern United States; a land that gave Bowden a sense of peace in a chaotic world. The work highlights the grave losses to the desert ecology brought about by mass development and brings to life the unique culture of the desert southwest.

Bowden makes the issues facing the desert interesting by refusing to play the injured environmentalist. Rather than presenting himself as a victim of a society that is consuming every natural resource for the sake of profit, Bowden recognizes his own membership in his own society. He takes responsibility for the consequences of society’s existence. It’s this approach that provides credibility to Bowden’s observations and links Blue Desert to reality.

My main problem with the book stemmed from Bowden’s writing style. It was a bit jumbled with timeframes jumping from past to present. Bowden also mixed in segments of stories seemingly from his days as a reporter in Arizona. This was presumably done to give definition to the society to which he belonged, but I found these vignettes to be incoherent and a distraction from the main chapters of the book.

Lastly, Blue Desert leans more towards the sociology of desert rather than its ecology. Therefore, if the sociology of this region is of interest, this may be a good resource. However, for the pure beauty of this region, Bowden does not come close to the world captured by Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire.

[Andrew]

Charles Bowden is one of those writers who deserve to be far, far better known. I first heard about him through the (equally underappreciated) Scott Carrier, who deals with similar issues of environment, Western landscape, violence, and poverty. These are all essays that explore the Southwest as it has evolved, through striking miners and cigar-chomping bosses, Indians lost on their own land and the vast housing estates popping up across the Arizona desert, migrant workers, environmental protesters, king-of-the-motherfuckers James G. Watt (look him up), and so forth. Necessary reading on America as we know it.

And reading Blue Desert 25 years after it was written, I can't help but think it presages a lot of our modern chaos re: border policy, migration, marginalized workers (especially marginalized workers of color) and that typical Trump voter, the sausage-skinned and polo-shirted Sunbelter who cares far more about ensuring an even emerald tone on the Bermuda grass from holes 1 through 18 than about the life or livelihood of anyone on the maintenance crew.

[Christie Bane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should not have read this book, really I should not have.

But why would I say such a thing, if I gave it 5 stars, you must be wondering? Well, because it reminded me too much of how much I love the desert. I prefer to repress that awareness.

If I want to keep my job and my boyfriend, which I emphatically do, I MUST stay in Florida. Neither of those two things can move to the desert. Florida is a great place to live. It’s comfortable and beautiful and laidback. But this book was completely infused with the harshness of the desert, and THAT is what I miss the most about it. The murderous heat, the deadly mountains, the desert animals, almost all of which are sharp or poisonous in some way. The way that you can be in serious danger of dying from heat when the clear air of the desert makes it look like an interstate or a town are just steps in front of you but you’re really twenty miles away. Words like these: “I wanted to roll in the dirt, eat the dust, stuff my mouth with sand, to lie there on the creosote flats in the 110-degree warmth and listen to the faint breezes work the slender winds of the greasewood...At first light, the coyotes would give the dawn song, always a frail thing in this part of the desert, and I would brew coffee and watch color bleed back into the land.” I KNOW HOW HE FEELS!!

Charles Bowden embraced all the typically less-appealing parts of the desert Southwest, like I did. He also sees the Southwest as an aberration, an artificial civilization that can’t exist forever and that some day will be swallowed by the desert when the water runs out. The desert is full of tokens of past civilizations, especially if you walk the remote parts of it like he did — petroglyphs and pottery shards that have sat out for hundreds of years, just waiting patiently to be seen by some crazy desert rat or, more likely, some migrant walking north.

I even understand the title, Blue Desert. I know the exact quality of the light he’s talking about, and I know the feeling it inspires too.

This was a great book, but kind of a dangerous one for me to read. Tucson for me is like the ex that you can’t quite get over but you lie to yourself and tell yourself you have because by all objective standards, the replacement is miles better. This book was like the memory that you stuff down the memory hole (if you’re smart), reminding you just how intense it was, even if it really wasn’t altogether good for you.

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bowden suits me well because he’s an observer in the manner I tend to be. (“I am not a union man. I am not the man who joins things. I am not a company man. I am not the man who ever believes in the corporation. And I am not neutral.”) I can run my blood hot over a subject and yet still be cool water, still not take sides. I’d rather observe the river, I’d rather cross the river, I’d rather observe it again from the opposite side. I like, too much, the march of contradiction. (“This book is fat with contradictions,” Bowden promises, “but sounds one steady note: the land.”)

But observing the world in that way is wanting to experience it more than judge it. That’s what you find here. Experiences. Not judgements, occasionally opinions, occasionally strong opinions, but not conclusions, not solutions. Just experiences. Walk a hundred miles through the blue desert in order to understand. Etc.

[Joshua West · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic, at times beautiful at others harrowing. Blue Desert is a strange yet oddly cohesive mix of nature writing and true crime reporting. It seems like an odd blend at first but Chuck Bowden makes a compelling argument that the same forces are at play in humanity's desire to murder the earth as in its desire to murder itself. That for every poisoned coyote, every executed cougar, every infant bat dying on a cave floor from drinking its mother's DDT laced milk, there is an elderly man found with his head bashed in on the floor of his Arizona retirement home, or the skeleton of a missing child reclining in the shade of a mesquite tree. This is not the nature writing of Emerson, Aldo Leopold or Craig Childs. What lyricism lies within these pages is hard earned, sifted from the bones and ashes that litter the desert floor. Some of the more moving passages come in the last chapter, wherein Bowden braves the same harsh route used by those crossing the border from Mexico to the US. A place where migrants, forced into the remotest stretches of the Sonoran Desert by ever more militarized border policies, regularly perish of heatstroke and dehydration. It is only here that Bowden, exhausted, thirsty, surrounded by the discarded possessions of those that have gone before him, allows himself a passage like this:
"Everywhere the earth is beauty. The mountains lift sharply off the valley floor, rockpiles almost naked of plants. Beauty. The moon flashes off the stone walls. Beauty. The creosote, the much derided greasewood, stands spaced like a formal garden. Beauty. Stars crowd the sky and I can hear them buzzing with the fires of their explosive gases. I tear the wrapper from a Granola bar and crunch the grains between my teeth. I tip the plastic jug up to my lips and swallow. I lock on the moon. Beauty."

[Drea · Rating 2 out of 5]

well, i guess i'll go ahead and explain why i'm rating this one so low. (it's certainly not the quality of bowden's writing.)

there is an insufferable undertone of misogyny throughout this book. it lies in what the author clearly chooses to omit--the voices, stories, and perspectives of women. his prose is excellent, his style captivating, so i find it hard to believe he lacks the necessary insight to extend empathy towards other genders. after all, this collection comprises many examples of him demonstrating this for his fellow man.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Experiential, exploratory, gonzo-esque desert journalism at its best. I’m a big fan of Bowden’s work. He again sustains curiosity that prefers to kick over the rocks of society and see what’s underneath. Bowden was exploring true empathy through investigative journalism before “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” was trendy.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles Bowden, who died at 69 in 2014, wrote dozens of books, hundreds of magazine articles, and left eight manuscripts scheduled to be published over the next few years. Why has this titan of nonfiction been so overlooked by the writing establishment in the United States? Is it because his work has been difficult to characterize? Even Bowden admitted that bookstores never seemed to know where to put his books. Here in Phoenix, the Burton Barr central library consigns most of his books to the Arizona Room where they are not available for check out.

I was introduced to Bowden in a curious way. Cal Lash, a retired Phoenix police officer who had read my blog, emailed me about a book he was reading: America's Most Alarming Writer -- Essays on the Life and Work of Charles Bowden. He described it as being about his friend "Chuck."

The book he was reading is filled with essays by Bowden's collaborators, sources, and other writers -- among them Jim Harrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luis Alberto Urrea. All spoke of Bowden's unique window into the problems besetting the Southwest.

Lash knew I was on a mission to put together a reading list about the Southwest and Arizona. He offered to help, suggested that I start with Killing the Hidden Waters (1977) Bowden's first book. A slim volume, it predates by nine years Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, which is widely considered the bible on water woes in the West.

Bowden's approach in Killing the Hidden Waters is different than Reisner's. (See https://skayoliver.wordpress.com/2020...) He writes as an historical anthropologist, with copious references, notes and a bleak humor that belies the seriousness of the region's disappearing water table. Bowden makes an irrefutable case for living in balance with our depleting natural resources, the most important of which is water. Where goes the groundwater, he argues, there goes the planet.

I was hooked by Bowden's simplicity, honesty and charm; I began to think of water as "fossil fuel." When it's gone, we're gone.

It made some sense for me then -- a would-be historian myself -- to proceed to Bowden's second book about the West, Blue Desert (1986). In the interim between the publication of the two books, he had worked as a reporter for the now defunct Tucson Citizen, a daily newspaper. Some of the material that appears in Blue Desert, appeared in the Citizen in another form.

The copy of Blue Desert I read (2018) appears with a foreward by Francisco Cantú, whose border patrol memoir, The Line Becomes a River, was the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2018 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award that same year.

In his introduction Cantú contrasts the way the book had appeared to him the first time he read it as a young man in his 20s to his second reading now. Certain references, such as calling the region the Sunbelt -- an 1980s marketing lure of residential developers -- and those we now call "illegals" as wetbacks, are now outdated. Also jarring is the occasional all-boys' club winking by Bowden when he goes beyond simply recording women's breasts as "spilling out of halter tops" to savoring bodies that "squirm with pleasure against the cloth." The women in his accounts are mostly matriarchs with wills of iron, abused children or sex objects. But Blue Desert is also filled with Bowden's self-condemnation of secret hungers. He recognizes his animal appreciation of all the senses and his own accountability in equal measures.

Organizationally, Bowden structured Blue Desert to hit all the issues facing Arizona in the 1980s -- and today -- down to eleven essays. Not a small feat, given the hundreds of people and stories he reported over the years he worked for the Citizen.Additionally, he couples the entries with italicized anecdotes that give readers a spooky foretaste of books that would follow. Books such as Juárez: the Laboratory of Our Future (1998); and Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family (2002).

Blue Desert is divided into three parts: Beasts, Players, and Deserts. Bowden is at his most viceral in his descriptions in Part I. In "Bats," he writes:
"My mouth chews the darkness like a thick paste. We stand in feces, hills of feces, and the grey powder slops over our running shoes and buries our ankles. . .The rock walls feel like cloth to the touch; a wilderness of fungus thrives in the warm room. We climb. The hills of feces roll like trackless dunes. .The dunes toss like waves and in between the dark mounds writhe masses of beetle larvae."

We are stuck in a cave near two eastern Arizona mining towns, Clifton and Morenci with Bowden and Ronnie Sidner, a scientist with a special love and knowledge of bats. Here, as elsewhere, Bowden first focuses tight, then more broadly to story of bats and man, starting with the heyday of bat guano marketing in the early 1900s through the devastation caused by their swarming in the 1960s -- 98 pounds of insects in a single night -- to their own depletion through the application of DDT.

He spends time with E. Lendell Cockrum, a professor in the University of Arizona's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, to learn that of the 850 species of bats in the world, 24 of them live in Arizona. He/we learn that bats can fly as high as 9200 feet and at eighty miles an hour. Cockrum banded and tracked the movements of more than 88,000 bats from Arizona to Sonora to Sinaloa and back. He learned why they were dying off by examining their dead and tracking the sale of DDT in Arizona. Just like humans, the bats are mammals. They suckle their young and the chemicals are passed on through their milk.

The first section includes equally informative essays entitled Antelope, Tortoise, and Fish. Each adds a piece of the region's history and its current prospects.

In Part II, Players, we spend time with a man named Frank Escalante in search of the burying place of a sibling who died as an infant. Escalante's story of his family's land-holding in Tucson and its "nibbling" loss provides a sobering look at the story behind that urban center's hispanic forebearers.

We travels with Mike Rios to visit the Agua Caliente of Palm Springs tribe to see if they could tell him any success stories from the deal they made with a developer. Everywhere he encounters abuse, exploitation and human cruelty that reveal the darker side of development in contrast to the myths of the Winning of the West. Rios is a Papago. He is convinced, as Bowden tells it, that the "Bureau of Indian Affairs in particular and whites in general have crushed Indian families with their care and meddling."

Bowden communes with Dave Foreman of Earth First! at the twentieth anniversary of the death of Glen Canyon. And amidst the merry-making, he traces the history of the environmental movement and disses the happy bedfellows of business developer and government in the persons of Del Webb and Secretary of the Interior James Watts.

A Company Man drives Bowden around Ajo in the midst of a prolonged copper strike between the Phelps Dodge copper company and the Union. This was not new territory for me since I had read Barbara Kingsolver's Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983. (See https://skayoliver.wordpress.com/2020...) But Bowden's quick historical thumbnail of Arizona's mining history and the realness in his portrait of Ajo is beautiful in its simplicity.

Proceed with caution when you read Part III: Desert. In Bone, we learn how one last grisly story leads Bowden to leave his job at the newspaper and head for a desert "uncluttered by rest areas, trail signs, water fountains and short cuts." In Black and Blue he records two long hikes with naturalist and marathoner Bill Broyles, who co-edited America's Most Alarming Writer. In each Bowden narrates border crossings made by immigrants to the north, recreating how painful a life it would have to be to make such a journey.

Having already read The Devil's Highway, by Luis Alberto Urrea (2004), I had relived an accurate description of the real thing: a tragic crossing made by 14 Central Americans that ended in disaster. (See https://skayoliver.wordpress.com/2019....) Bowden's essays are something else. Although they included details of the physical deprivations of such journeys, they focus primarily on the author's own relationship with the desert and inner monologues about his personal struggles.

I found a few objections about the final piece, Blue. It is dominated by Bowden's distress over the collapse of his marriage and self-recriminations about the part he played in its demise. Let me enumerate: 1. He chooses to describe his wife's body coldly, objectively: "She has large breasts hanging from a thin body." Her female attributes are soon to be mutilated by surgery for cancer; 2. He decides to absent himself for a story assignment the day of the surgery instead of being by her side -- a morally reprehensible decision; 3. Again he provides an objective description of what he imagines the surgery will entail: "They will cut off her breast and will search her tissue to see -- to see if more needs to be hacked off her body."

He explains he will include nothing about his marriage or his wife's surgery in the story he produces for the newspaper. ("There will be nothing about the cancer, the scalpel incising the soft white flesh topped by the faint pink nipple.") Well, bully for you, Chuck. Enough already. Permit me here, dear reader, to cry TMI: too much information. This was an invasion of someone else's privacy.

Bowden admits that he has no simple handle on the desert. "I haven't got much theory on why I go to dry, empty places." As I see it, Bowden uses the desert as a retreat from the enemy within. It's a healthier one than climbing inside a bottle of red wine.

The problem with the desert is that no matter how vast and empty a panorama it presents, everywhere you go, there you are.

[Anna Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes problematic, often times sexist book written by a journalist who truly understood the damage humans can do, are doing, and will do to the planet. As an environmentalist myself, I found Bowden stopped me in my tracks several times and made me question things I thought I knew -- and made me feel entirely small, entirely hopeless, and entirely hopeful all at once. As a woman, I also found myself deeply uncomfortable by how he described and discussed the women he interacted with.

A+ for the planet, F for treating others with respect. I will likely read portions of this again, but it was a slow read with heavy content. Not for the faint of heart.

[Mark Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Following in the steps of Edward Abbey, the author touts the majesty of the desert, as well as the darker side of development. At the very beginning of the book, he expresses his love and concern for the desert, “….My home is a web of dreams. Thousands move here each year under the banners of the New West or the Sunbelt. This is the place where they hope to escape their pasts, the unemployment, the smoggy skies, dirty cities, crush of human numbers. This they cannot do. Instead, they reproduce the world they have fled. I am drawn to the frenzy of this act.”
Published in 1986, this would be Bowden’s third book-length work He writes with a reporter’s objectivity (he was a journalist) and yet unfettered passion for both the desert’s beauty and the unavoidable reality of abuse, exploitation and human cruelty.



The author paints a poignant picture of the invisible people who try to cross the border between Mexico and the U.S. over this unforgiving desert, “They cross a hot desert, a dry desert, one of North America’s benchmarks for thirst, and they cross with one or two gallons of water. They walk thirty, forty, fifty, sixty miles in order to score. The line here means not six points, but a job…..Here are the rules. Get caught and you go back to Mexico. Make it across and you get a job in the fields or backrooms. Don’t make it and you die.”
He goes on, “Nobody pays much attention to this summer sport. The players are nameless and constantly changing and so there is little identification with them or with their skills and their defeats. The players are brown, and this earns them a certain contempt and makes the attraction difficult to sell to spectators…”
A new edition of the book includes a foreword by Francisco Cantu, a former border guard and the author of NY Times best seller, “The Line Becomes A River”. He provides additional insights into Bowden’s work, “…We see the version of Bowden that he would likely most want us to remember—someone who did their best to be an honest witness, someone who was haunted by modernity and his place in it, someone who grappled with his demons by gazing deeply into the desert.”
One of Bowden’s most important books, Blue Desert continues to remind us of the cruelty and beauty of the world around us.

[Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a profound and haunting book. Having seen a lot of the ugliness that involves humanity Bowden’s ability to describe the world from the natural beauty of the Sonoran desert is at times breath taking and deeply disturbing such as the sheer depravity of a promising young man turning into a scumbag pedophile that murders and rapes a seven year old girl. I discovered him in a travel book about Tucson and to that writer I am indebted. I am glad I gave him a 5 rating if just for this suggestion alone. Early in this book he describes things we perceive which are often alas not true. The writer is a reporter for a local Tucson newspaper now unfortunately like some many others defunct. He is talking to a group of Mexican migrant farm workers and they are complaining about the statue of Pancho Villa in the downtown Tucson square. That the horse has no cojones aka balls. They say Villa would never have ridden a ball-less horse. The writer back, when journalists actually did research goes down to the square and discovers that indeed the horse statue has no balls. On another occasion he is doing a follow up to a gun shop story and asks the owner who is carrying two .45 1911 pistols in shoulder holsters: “Have you ever been robbed?” His response: “Never successfully.” Outstanding Dirty Harry level good shit. The book is sprinkled with insights like this into the human condition. Much of which is the inherent evil of our species. I have ordered 10 more of his books and am halfway through the second and let me tell you pilgrims our man Bowden does not disappoint. Try him if you dare.

[Robyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars // Raw and powerful... but I'm not sure my heart can suffer a second reading.

Within the beauty of the desert lies the ugliness of man; this is the essence of Bowden's "Blue Desert". Women are objectified, men are beasts, and the desert spares no one.

There are complex issues presented here, often in an objective manner. The loss of native lands and ways, the loss of wilderness, the loss of humanity, and the loss of hope. Greed. Development. Border crossings. Injustice.

From "Black", page 144:

"We are beginning to realize what we have lost with our wonderful inventions and our monstrous new powers. We are becoming more and more aware that our civilization destroys the foundations that support it by devouring the earth and the things of the earth. // But we don't have the courage to back away, to stop, to restrain ourselves. I know I don't."

The 2017 foreword by Francisco Cantú lends context to the book, originally published in 1986. I'd recommend reading the foreword if you're contemplating whether or not to embark on this journey of essays. While I anticipated some of the book's darkness, I was not prepared for the multiple mentions of rape and pedophilia -- Bowden's work as a reporter / journalist often took him to the underbelly of humanity.

[Klagleder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lines like this …
“It is not that we are too busy building the empire to tend to details but simply that we are too busy running to ever look back at the ghosts trailing behind us…”

“A world empty of useless species will be a world with fewer tough questions. And so the planet is becoming a better place for people who hurt their heads when they think”.

“We have violated some deep important thing and we cannot doubt this fact”.

“So I visit the past to taste the deeper present and prospect the inevitable future”.

… and I know I’ve hunkered down with Chuck Bowden again. Like Emerson, like Thoreau, Muir, Abbey and others, Bowden - the seer, the outcast and like a few of us, not very well enculturated into this culture, a good thing (some of us - a few of us at least - gotta remain sane and at least partially un-bought).

Collectively, we are vastly out of touch with reality. I relearn this fact each time I read Bowden. Nevertheless, it is a warm place to be. Clear in the knowledge.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The three books by Charles Bowden that I have read in the last month have impressed me that he is a major talent in writings on the deserts of the American Southwest and Mexico. His Blue Desert by Charles Bowden is also excellent, particularly the last essay entitled "Blue," which is about Bowden's attempt to hike through the Cabeza Prieta Wilderness with an associate using the same route a Mexican wetback might take.

Other essays talk about people and animals that reside in the Arizona desert. As he says at one point, "I haven't got much theory on why I go to hot, dry, empty places." But when he goes, he does them justice in his own unique way.

Too bad that he is gone now. Fortunately, he wrote a lot of books that I haven't read yet.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A melancholic ode to a very particular place at a very particular time. Yet Bowden’s writing is still relevant to the Southwest of today. The “Blue” of the title is the pit in your stomach, the lump in your throat, that follows any serious thought about the commodification and pillaging of anything we get our hands on.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I keep the February 2019 Arizona Highways magazine to reread Charle Bowden’s essay, “Point of View” from time to time. So, I picked up one of his books filled with other essays classified by Beasts, Players, and Deserts. Some of Bowden’s writing forces me to slow down, look at the beauty around me, and ponder simple truths that are hard to grasp.

[Kyra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this one for my job and while I didn’t love all of it, I do admire the obvious time and heart out into this work. It really got me thinking and I hope I have a better understanding of a place I will call home very soon!

[Chelsea K · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

[Dee Dubin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Straight forward descriptions of how he finds life in the desert around Tucson. A journalist describing how he sees and tells stories.

[Joshua Turek · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good. The Desert chapter in particular touches on what it means to live in this place better than most

[Ben Gibson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Banger but certain points were hard to get through

[VeeInNY]

Elegantly brutal...
Written 35 years ago and sobering... all the issues remain at a deeper level... crime, population, immigration, water rights.... The desert remains...

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

a book in three parts - beasts, players, deserts - investigating the living desert and its fauna, demographics, and changing landscape. it's a pretty dated style of gonzo/macho journalism, dwelling on the seediness of americana and an erosion of ecology and human lives in the southwest, which i think is what drew me to it........ i love the desert and i love faded americana....... but the way bowden writes can feel a bit monotonous, he's so disaffected and yet wants to remain at the center of his own writing, which can makes it kind of a drag at times

more than a collection of articles, this is a lyrical taxonomy of the people and species and spaces faced with extinction and removal in the face of capital and occupation...... native american populations, mexicans, union members, environmentalists, bats, tortoises, coyotes, ex-wives........ sometimes bowden's prosaic tone works, but most of the book feels written in the sand, nothing really leaves a lasting impression....... occasionally bowden likes to offer a grisly account of atrocious violence or tragedy using the same cold affectation he uses to describe the gamblers at a laughlin casino and it doesnt land

good premise overall, i liked the book and its a thoughtful tribute to one of the most beautiful and biodiverse places on earth, it just feels more like a barroom sketch than a landscape painting

[Kirk Astroth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bowden writes passionately about the Sonoran Desert, the people, plants and animals who live here. And he laments its destruction. My favorite line: "Ot is not that we are too busy running ever to look back at the ghosts trailing behind us or down at the ground where the writhing beasts shudder with their last convulsion of life. We haven't got time for this nature stuff. We were born to drive, not park." Particularly great was his final chapter on hiking across the desert from Mexico to Tacna--like other migrants seeking a better life across the blue desert. And they were prepared and almost didn't make it.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ed Abbey at a newspaper desk

That's the best way to describe much of what Bowden writes here, since most of it comes from his time on the police desk at the Tucson Citizen. And it, and his nature essays, are in Abbey's vein without being in any way derivative. (It's really the best way to describe Bowden in general, in fact.)

Watch him recreate the treks the mojados take across the Sonoran Desert. Here him renarrate some of his crime story coverage. Let him shine a flashlight on a bit of Tucson.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book felt very real to me, very true. Not in the since of a work of nonfiction but as a convoy of emotions about the seemingly intangible place, the desert. The author uses his stories to illustrate the shifting of times in the Sunbelt and Southwest. Bowden captures spirit and sense of place of the desert through a combination of his personal struggles moving through the landscape, time to see it change, and will to do so.

So much for blue getting you down...

[Zane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in college but if you love the desert like I do and want to understand the backdrop of Arizona as well as the immigration issue than it is a good one to add to your list.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A favorite. Several stories about the population explosion in the west and its effect on desert species, human traditions and natural resources - the darker side of the Sunbelt.

[Cheryl Schibley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great book written in 1986 about the impact of rapid growth on the natural desert. There's no turning back.