Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground - Hardcover

Charles Bowden is a journalist whose work appears regularly in Harper's, Esquire, GQ, and other national publications. He is the author of several previous books of nonfiction. He lives in Tucson.

*Starred Review* Bowden, a midwesterner who discovered his spiritual home and totem, the mesquite, in the brutal and beautiful Sonoran Desert, trained as a historian but was destined to become a journalist witnessing life in a violent and volatile world ruled by "cannibals . . . who create nothing but who can consume everything." In a fiery and poetic indictment that continues the feverish social and moral inquiry begun in Blood Orchid (1995), he profiles rapists, drunks, outlaws, a suicidal artist, ne'er-do-wells, and do-gooders; suffers grievously over tortured and murdered children; brilliantly links the story of an institutionalized self-taught artist and convicted killer who obsessively paints pictures of presidents with a blazing reassessment of Lyndon Johnson; chronicles an execution; mourns the death of four friends; and vividly portrays the mighty nineteenth-century Yaqui war leader Cajeme. As furious, wounded, lustful, and compelling as Algren and Miller, Bowden confesses his depthless hunger for women, good food, red wine, sunlight, gardening, and freedom, and warns, presciently, of an inevitable wave of violent change. Fueled as much by love and compassion as by sorrow and rage, Bowden's red-hot blues embrace life in all its confounding intensity. Donna Seaman
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