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Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America, by Charles Bowden
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In this ground-shaking, breath-taking cri de coeur, Bowden delves with love-driven fury for the roots of our brutal history in this once-brave New World. The figures he casts before us-from Pancho Villa to a modern-day drug lord, from General Sherman to a skid-row Sioux named Robert Sundance-trace a story not so much of rapaciousness as of fear and loathing. Bowden twines it with the natural history of the hammer orchid, a carnivore whose deceptive delicacy comes to stand for the terror and hypocrisy that have perverted our love of the land, its peoples, and our very natures.
- Sales Rank: #840851 in Books
- Brand: Brand: North Point Press
- Published on: 2002-02-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .72" w x 5.51" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Booklist
Bowden is an incandescent writer attuned to beauty as well as crime and violence. He's written about drug dealers, Charles Keating, and his beloved Sonora Desert in books notable for their jolting lyricism. Here he takes us on a wild journey through his past and across the gritty American and Mexican West, ranting all the way about our poisoned earth and corrupted society. Bowden's "blood orchids" are evil, malignant blossoms that feed on nuclear waste and the horrors of war, massacre, torture, and prejudice. We have a compulsion for "killing the thing we love," Bowden claims, an urge responsible, in part, for the severe damage we've done to the environment. Bowden rails against this travesty as well as the even greater crimes perpetuated against Native Americans, but he also declares his love for the "mess" of life in the Americas, the "strange mongrel mixture of races, ideas, seeds, spores, viruses, bacteria." He despises the sanctimoniousness of the environmental movement and doesn't hesitate to declare his politically incorrect taste for alcohol, women in high heels, guns, and traveling at high speeds. As his narrative progresses, Bowden's stream of consciousness becomes a raging river, and riding it proves to be exhilarating and painful, provoking and cathartic. Donna Seaman
Review
"Blood Orchid is its own trip, brilliant [and] always compelling. Bowden says what he means, hang the consequences. He is becoming one of our most important voices in the so-called New West." -William Kittredge, Los Angeles Times
"Bowden's anger is delicious [He] believes that the environmental crisis is not fundamentally physical but rather is caused by the fact that `we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act.' His book is ironic proof that the embers of that fire still glow." --Outside
"A first-rate eye-opener to our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox (all of them) books about America."--Jim Harrison
About the Author
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, Arizona.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Love the first part of the argument, take issue with the second
By joe520
A rich and stimulating book, and highly recommended, but I want to take issue with the implicit argument that runs throughout. Bowden's argument is that the official narrative of the United States (and Europe before 1492) has played itself out, has shown itself to be corrupt (or worse, empty) at the core. Fine. As some one who grew up during Watergate and the tail end of the Vietnam war, as someone who paid attention to the US's misadventures in Latin America during his college years, as someone who saw a generation of fine young warriors' lives wasted in Iraq after 9/11, and as someone who thinks our overreaching reaction to terrorism is annoying theater, I am ready to agree that the official narrative has a lot of problems. I have no disagreements with Bowden on that. I share his annoyance at the indignities that I suffer when passing through customs upon my return from other countries, I cringe when I see how the war on drugs has given us a militarized police force that abuses its own citizens. And while I am an environmentalist in practice, I am deeply suspicious of many aspects of the movement, especially the notion that we have to somehow save the earth. But Bowden then slips into the second half of his argument, namely that to live in a regime that has lost its legitimacy condemns all citizens to illegitimate lives. To hear Bowden, anyone who isn't a drunken journalist having adventures in Mexico is a mindless office drone, a fat and ignorant consumer, or hopelessly drugged up to avoid seeing how empty and meaningless the official narrative is. But I know plenty of individuals who live passionate, committed, sometimes dangerous lives - and who also happen to be Americans. If there is one thing you can say about living a modern life in America it is that it gives you the freedom to make your own narrative and not get sucked into the official story. I know that sounds like faint praise for America, and it is, to say "the best thing about living in America is you can secretly pursue your own version of happiness and you don't have to subscribe to the party line." But faint praise or not, it is more than was possible in the indigenous cultures that were brutally pushed aside to make way for the American way of life. Indeed I share Bowden's outrage at what wealthy whites did to Native Americans (and to blacks and poor whites) and are still doing. And my outrage is double when I realize that the crimes against indigenous people were justified by apologists who claimed that we were replacing their society with one that was morally superior. When that society turned out to be hollow and corrupt 100 years later, it is quite possible to look back and see the genocide as a double tragedy. But it is also possible to look forward and say that the new society mostly gets out of people's way and makes space for them to find and pursue their own passion. Small comfort perhaps, but I'll take it. In fact, a strong thread of American culture that has been present since colonial times is the celebration of this emptiness at the center, this radical freedom that lets people form small groups that make their own meaning. Its not much, but look at the situation in Europe that this desire sprang from. In short, it is possible to accept the first part of Bowden's argument - that the official US culture we live in is corrupt at its heart (or worse, empty) without accepting the second argument - namely that we all must derive our meaning from our culture, thus becoming drugged, fat, mindless workaholic zombies. Living an authentic life is not easy and not for everyone but has it ever been? The best that can be said about Bowden's book is that he sets up the argument and provides a few clues about how to find that authenticity yourself - or rather, he tells you what fake stuff to avoid. Worth reading.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A wild ride
By A Customer
I'd be lying if I said this was an easy read, but Bowden warns the reader from the beginning that he travels fast. The subject matter is more than brutal and disturbing. It is enough to make you regret that you are a human being, but I am not sure that Bowden's goal is too make you feel hopeless. In many ways he is optimistic about the future in spite of the bloody past he graphically offers to the reader. He wants to move beyond explaining the past because as he says, "What is explained can be denied but what is felt cannot be forgotten." It would be impossible to read this book and not feel something, but the bigger sin in Bowden's eyes would be forgetting what you felt. The rawness and 85 mph pace of the prose alone makes this a difficult book to forget, but the subject matter and content moves you to question the deeper issues that plague a society that has forgotten how to feel, how to love, and how to live. I found portions of the book difficult to grasp and the book is mentally and emotionally exhausting in many ways. This does not diminish the importance of Bowden's message, but as a reader you need to be prepared to spend some time digesting the material.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Blood orchid
By Jared Hight
As the Hammer Orchid seduces its prey with false promises of satisfaction, Charles Bowden draws his readers into his own personal saga of pain with an impressive display of anger and wrath. Multitudes of partially coherent and mostly unrelated images of sex and war are thrown to the reader at a steadily unrelenting pace, leaving one with the choice of either leaving them at the table, or ingesting them wholly and accepting the emotional heartburn that will accompany the feast. For those who choose the path of greater resistance, the rewards will follow. A highly recommended but particularly difficult read, intended for those with a passionate devotion to nature, man, history and their shared bonds.
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