Charles Bowden has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 2.8★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Murder City.
Murder City
Summary
Charles Bowden writes, “this book is not about how the world ends but how a new world is being born.” Murder City explores this new world, focusing on the idea that Mexico is collapsing into a permanent culture of violence. Bowden focuses on Ciudad Juarez, which lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, last year alone 1,607 people were murdered, a number that is set to accelerate in 2009.
Miss Sinaloa is a beauty queen who loses her mind; her descent into madness becomes a parable for the town itself. As Bowden searches for reasons to explain why so many are dying, he realizes that what is happening in Juarez and other border towns—caught in the crosshairs of the drug and immigration wars—represents the total collapse of civic society.
©2010 Charles Bowden (P)2010 Phoenix
The Red Caddy
Summary
A passionate advocate for preserving wilderness and fighting the bureaucratic and business forces that would destroy it, Edward Abbey (1927-1989) wrote fierce, polemical books such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang that continue to inspire environmental activists. In this eloquent memoir, his friend and fellow desert rat Charles Bowden reflects on Abbey the man and the writer, offering up thought-provoking, contrarian views of the writing life, literary reputations, and the perverse need of critics to sum up “what he really meant and whether any of it was truly up to snuff.” The Red Caddy is the first literary biography of Abbey in a generation. Refusing to turn him into a desert guru, Bowden instead recalls the wild man in a red Cadillac convertible for whom liberty was life. He describes how Desert Solitaire paradoxically “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground” that Abbey wanted to protect, while sealing his literary reputation and overshadowing the novels that Abbey considered his best books. Bowden also skewers the cottage industry that has grown up around Abbey’s writing, smoothing off its rougher (racist, sexist) edges while seeking “anecdotes, little intimacies...pieces of the True Beer Can or True Old Pickup Truck.” Asserting that the real essence of Abbey will always remain unknown and unknowable, The Red Caddy still catches gleams of “the fire that from time to time causes a life to become a conflagration.”
©2018 the Charles Clyde Bowden Literary Trust (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
Jericho
Summary
In a career defined by an allegiance to the truth, Charles Bowden's reporting continually unearthed the gritty realities behind high-profile hype, including the doomed war on drugs. His daring expeditions to Ciudad Juárez, which resulted in such books as his best-seller Murder City, left him with haunting images of ruthless drug lords and their prey. In Jericho, an unpublished work brought to light after Bowden's death in 2014, he captures the monumental corruption and addiction to power that fuel Mexico's drug cartels - and that have fueled much of humanity's suffering throughout the ages. Interspersed with scenes from the battle of the walled city of Jericho, which in Bowden's eyes is not a story of inspiring strength but of bloodthirsty plunder, the world of El Sicario ("the hitman") unfolds in brutal detail. Bucolic settings such as the Falcon International Reservoir become the site of an unsolved murder as Bowden examines why the high murder rate in Juárez has yet to spill across the border. Yet, recalling his younger days in Louisiana and retracing the atrocities of racism in America, Bowden reveals a history where greed knows no borders, while undaunted voices (including his own) relentlessly expose its perpetrators.
©2020 The Charles Clyde Bowden Literary Trust, care of Tim Schaffner, care of Susan Schulman Literary Agency (P)2020 Tantor
Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing
Summary
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 21st 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. The book is published by University of Texas Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks. "Bowden manages to write about these currently unfashionable topics with humor, style, and laconic compression." (Edward Abbey) "Here is the new American nature writing - resourceful, funny, personal, full of good facts, words of the locals, hard-hitting but not self-righteous." (Gary Snyder) "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." (Booklist)
©2009 Charles Bowden (P)2021 Redwood Audiobooks