"Here Bowden (Blue Desert) probes the spiritual decadence of those arid lands that knife into Mexico from southern Arizona, the desierto. For the author, this is home turf, and he knows it well. What he shows is a harsh land repeatedly exploited by a greedy white culture and now ruled by drug lords and land barons. He focuses on the victims living in fearful and impoverished Sonoran villages, shifting his gaze at times to the exploiters, like Phoenix...

Ciudad Juarez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad. Last year 1,607 people were killed, a number that is on pace to increase in 2009. In Murder City, Charles Bowden, one of the few journalists who has spent extended periods of time in Juarez, has written an extraordinary account...

From the Publisher: The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Following the astonishing success of his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century." This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike...

From memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism--this anthology brings together fifty works from all genres of creative nonfiction. --from back cover.