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Living in the Future
by Charles Bowden
In Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing, the brilliant and iconoclastic Charles Bowden continues the quest he first set out on in Blood Orchid (1995) and Blues for Cannibals (2002)—to explore, as Jim Harrison says "our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox - all of them - books about America."
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, the third part in a trilogy which started with Blood Orchid (1995) and continued with Blues for Cannibals (2002), 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, and need it now more than ever.
"Affirms Bowden's place in the cranky Edward Abbey-Hunter S. Thompson school of Western individualists." - Kirkus Reviews.
"Bowden is a blood-and-guts journalist with a poet's sensibility, a noirish naturalist, a ferociously inquisitive witness to life's glory and horror torn between the desire to embrace the world and the need to hole up in a drapes-drawn motel room." - Booklist.
This information about Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Charles Bowden's journalism 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.
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