Inferno

Front Cover
University of Texas Press, May 1, 2006 - Nature - 176 pages
Charles Bowden has been an outspoken advocate for the desert Southwest since the 1970s. Recently his activism helped persuade the U.S. government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument in southern Arizona. But in working for environmental preservation, Bowden refuses to be one who “outline[s] something straightforward, a manifesto with clear rules and a set of plans for others to follow.” In this deeply personal book, he brings the Sonoran Desert alive, not as a place where well-meaning people can go to enjoy “nature,” but as a raw reality that defies bureaucratic and even literary attempts to define it, that can only be experienced through the senses. Inferno burns with Charles Bowden's passion for the desert he calls home. “I want to eat the dirt and lick the rock. Or leave the shade for the sun and feel the burning. I know I don't belong here. But this is the only place I belong,” he says. His vivid descriptions, complemented by Michael Berman's acutely observed photographs of the Sonoran Desert, make readers feel the heat and smell the dryness, see the colors in earth and sky, and hear the singing of dry bones across the parched ground. Written as “an antibiotic” during the time Bowden was lobbying the government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Inferno repudiates both the propaganda and the lyricism of contemporary nature writing. Instead, it persuades us that “we need these places not to remember our better selves or our natural self or our spiritual self. We need these places to taste what we fear and devour what we are. We need these places to be animals because unless we are animals we are nothing at all. That is the price of being a civilized dude.”

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Contents

Section 1
7
Section 2
8
Section 3
10
Section 4
13
Section 5
14
Section 6
17
Section 7
21
Section 8
26
Section 20
105
Section 21
106
Section 22
109
Section 23
114
Section 24
121
Section 25
125
Section 26
126
Section 27
130

Section 9
33
Section 10
38
Section 11
60
Section 12
65
Section 13
69
Section 14
74
Section 15
77
Section 16
78
Section 17
79
Section 18
83
Section 19
102
Section 28
133
Section 29
139
Section 30
153
Section 31
162
Section 32
165
Section 33
166
Section 34
168
Section 35
172
Section 36
173
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

Charles Bowden was born in Joliet, Illinois on July 20, 1945. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Arizona and a master's degree in American intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin. He completed work toward his doctorate there but walked out while defending his dissertation, because he was frustrated with what he felt were uninformed questions from his review committee. He was a reporter for The Tucson Citizen in the early 1980s. He wrote several books during his lifetime including Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields, and Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. He died on August 30, 2014 at the age of 69.

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