Book Review of “Blue Desert” by Charles Bowden
Reviewed by Mark D. Walker
Following in the steps of Edward Abbey, the author touts the majesty of the desert, as well as the darker side of development. At the very beginning of the book, he expresses his love and concern for the desert, “….My home is a web of dreams. Thousands move here each year under the banners of the New West or the Sunbelt. This is the place where they hope to escape their pasts, the unemployment, the smoggy skies, dirty cities, crush of human numbers. This they cannot do. Instead, they reproduce the world they have fled. I am drawn to the frenzy of this act.”
Published in 1986, this would be Bowden’s third book-length work He writes with a reporter’s objectivity (he was a journalist) and yet unfettered passion for both the desert’s beauty and the unavoidable reality of abuse, exploitation and human cruelty.
The author paints a poignant picture of the invisible people who try to cross the border between Mexico and the U.S. over this unforgiving desert, “They cross a hot desert, a dry desert, one of North America’s benchmarks for thirst, and they cross with one or two gallons of water. They walk thirty, forty, fifty, sixty miles in order to score. The line here means not six points, but a job…..Here are the rules. Get caught and you go back to Mexico. Make it across and you get a job in the fields or backrooms. Don’t make it and you die.”
He goes on, “Nobody pays much attention to this summer sport. The players are nameless and constantly changing and so there is little identification with them or with their skills and their defeats. The players are brown, and this earns them a certain contempt and makes the attraction difficult to sell to spectators…”
A new edition of the book includes a foreword by Francisco Cantu, a former border guard and the author of NY Times best seller, “The Line Becomes A River”. He provides additional insights into Bowden’s work, “…We see the version of Bowden that he would likely most want us to remember—someone who did their best to be an honest witness, someone who was haunted by modernity and his place in it, someone who grappled with his demons by gazing deeply into the desert.”
One of Bowden’s most important books, Blue Desert continues to remind us of the cruelty and beauty of the world around us.
Mark Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in (Guatemala 1971–73), co-founded a Guatemalan development agency and then managed child sponsorship programs for Plan International in Guatemala, Colombia and Sierra Leone. He has held senior fundraising positions for several groups like CARE International, MAP International, Make-A-Wish International, and was the CEO of Hagar. His memoir, Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond, was published by Peace Corps Writers in 2017 and was ranked 36th by Amazon for “Travel, Central America and Guatemala. Two of his articles were featured in Revue Magazine and several others in WorldView, Ragazine and in the “Crossing Class: The Invisible Wall” anthology by Wising Up Press. Mark’s wife and three children were born in Guatemala and now live in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Product details
⦁ Hardcover: 179 pages
⦁ Publisher: University of Arizona Press; First Edition edition (September 1, 1986)
⦁ Language: English
⦁ ISBN-10: 0816510059
⦁ ISBN-13: 978-0816510054
⦁ Package Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1 inches
⦁ Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (⦁ View shipping rates and policies)
⦁ Average Customer Review: ⦁ 4.6 out of 5 stars⦁ ⦁ 8 customer reviews
⦁ Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #761,256 in Books (⦁ See Top 100 in Books)
⦁ #1731 in ⦁ Books > ⦁ Politics ⦁ &⦁ Social Sciences > ⦁ Social Sciences > ⦁ Human Geography
⦁ #3421 in ⦁ Books > ⦁ Literature ⦁ &⦁ Fiction > ⦁ Essays ⦁ &⦁ Correspondence > ⦁ Essays