Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

by Charles Bowden, Scott Carrier (Foreword by)

Overview

The third book in Charles Bowden’s “accidental trilogy” that began with Blood Orchid and Blues for Cannibals, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing attempts to resolve the overarching question: “How can a person live a moral life in a culture of death?” As humanity moves further into the twenty-first century, Bowden continues to interrogate our roles in creating the ravaged landscapes and accumulated death that still surround us, as well as his own childhood isolation, his lust for alcohol and women, and his waning hope for a future. We witness post-Katrina New Orleans and terrorist-bombed Bali; we encounter our shared actions with the animal world and the desirous need for consumption; we see the clash and erosion of our physical and figurative borders, the savagery of our own civilization. A man of his time and out of time, Bowden seeks acceptance and a will to endure what may lie ahead.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781477316924
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	01/06/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	933,681
File size:	973 KB

About the Author

Author of many acclaimed books about the American Southwest and US-Mexico border issues, Charles Bowden (1945–2014) was a contributing editor for GQ, Harper’s, Esquire, and Mother Jones and also wrote for the New York Times Book Review, High Country News, and Aperture. His honors included a PEN First Amendment Award, Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, and the Sidney Hillman Award for outstanding journalism that fosters social and economic justice. He wrote The Red Caddy in 1994.

What People are Saying About This

Ron Hansen

A thrillingly good writer whose grandness of vision is only heightened by the bleak originality of his voice.

Edward Abbey

Bowden manages to write about these currently unfashionable topics with humor, style, and laconic compression.

Gary Snyder

Here is the new American nature writing—resourceful, funny, personal, full of good facts, words of the locals, hard-hitting but not self-righteous.

Donna Seaman

"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 . . . Writing with molten urgency, confessional magnetism, and piercing detail, Bowden chronicles his unlikely friendships with a rattlesnake and a desert tortoise, enigmatic encounters with women, the psychic repercussions of his murder investigations, and his part in a terrifying Greenpeace mission. Red wine, Moby Dick, human brutality, the suffering of other species, the obdurateness of paradox, the ambush of love, beauty beyond comprehension, the immensity of loss implicit in our planetary crimes––Bowden, singing in chains, says yes to all of life."

Editorial Reviews

A dark, foreboding meditation on life from the provocative author. In a postscript, Bowden (A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior, 2005, etc.) writes that this unclassifiable blend of memoir, reportage and philosophy, together with his Blood Orchid (1995) and Blues for Cannibals (2002), form an "accidental trilogy" seeking to answer the question, "how can a person live a moral life in a culture of death?" Written in a piercing blur of sharp sentences, the book conjures a landscape of death and loss-from the dead city of New Orleans, where "night comes down like the lid on a garbage can," to terrorist-bombed Bali-in which people attempt to explain the reality that is all around them. Bowden notes, however, that our ability to express ourselves through writing is often inaccurate, even artificial. "But words are all I have," he writes, "my skills are limited and the words at best are a veil, maybe even a shroud, between us and this world we touch but cannot embrace, a ball of dirt we stand on but never can really know." The author embraces all manner of experience, including drink, lovemaking, violence and nature. He declares himself a man at the edge, forever engaged in foolhardy and dangerous activities, always accepting but never submitting. "I have been walking out the door on peace and quiet most of my life," he writes. We see him trying to make sense of his childhood in Illinois, womanizing in Mexico, at sea on a 600-ton fishing vessel and firing his rifle carelessly at a coal train while driving across a desert in his pickup truck. Undoubtedly an acquired taste, Bowden's breakneck writing is bracing and irreverent. Yet a zenlike calm lies at the heart of hisbleak vision, one that he calls "snake-time," where he can simply be like the rattlesnake. In the end, he writes, love is the only thing that matters. 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...Writing with molten urgency, confessional magnetism, and piercing detail, Bowden chronicles his unlikely friendships with a rattlesnake and a desert tortoise, enigmatic encounters with women, the psychic repercussions of his murder investigations, and his part in a terrifying Greenpeace mission. Red wine, Moby Dick, human brutality, the suffering of other species, the obdurateness of paradox, the ambush of love, beauty beyond comprehension, the immensity of loss implicit in our planetary crimes––Bowden, singing in chains, says yes to all of life."

Booklist - Donna Seaman

"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 . . . Writing with molten urgency, confessional magnetism, and piercing detail, Bowden chronicles his unlikely friendships with a rattlesnake and a desert tortoise, enigmatic encounters with women, the psychic repercussions of his murder investigations, and his part in a terrifying Greenpeace mission. Red wine, Moby Dick, human brutality, the suffering of other species, the obdurateness of paradox, the ambush of love, beauty beyond comprehension, the immensity of loss implicit in our planetary crimes––Bowden, singing in chains, says yes to all of life."—Booklist

From the Publisher

"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...Writing with molten urgency, confessional magnetism, and piercing detail, Bowden chronicles his unlikely friendships with a rattlesnake and a desert tortoise, enigmatic encounters with women, the psychic repercussions of his murder investigations, and his part in a terrifying Greenpeace mission. Red wine, Moby Dick, human brutality, the suffering of other species, the obdurateness of paradox, the ambush of love, beauty beyond comprehension, the immensity of loss implicit in our planetary crimes––Bowden, singing in chains, says yes to all of life."

— Donna Seaman

Booklist