When it came to prisoners, Charles Bowden took none. Fools? He suffered none. And as for quarter or fu… well, none of either were given. Bold, sometimes brash, fiercely loyal, a blood enemy or the cruel and the greedy, with a heart as big as the wide open spaces of the American southwest that he came to call home and a mind with the seemingly limitless capacity to instantly recall a bewildering assortment of fact and figures, he was truly an original.
Word reached me just this very morning about something I have long been anticipating: the publication of new editions this October of Charles Bowden’s classic works “Blue Desert” and “Frog Mountain Blues” by the University of Arizona Press.
For the first review to be published in my new “all sorts” blog, I’ve chosen Stig Dagerman’s eye-opening as well as discomfiting collection of reports from post-World War II Germany titled German Autumn.
As Bowden told Brooke Gladstone during an interview on WNYC’s On the Media regarding his recent book Dreamland, “My dream is to invite a reader into a room and pour a nice cup of tea and then nail the damn door shut.” It is a dream that he has unquestionably realized.