Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

by Charles Bowden

Through stark observations and visceral experiences, Blood Orchid begins Charles Bowden's dizzying excavation of the brutal, systemic violence and corruption at the roots of American society. Like a nightmarish fever dream that turns out to be our own reality, Bowden visits dying friends in skid row apartments in Los Angeles, traverses San Francisco byways lined with clubs and joints, and roams through village bars and streets in the Sierra Madre mountains. In these wanderings resides a yearning for the understanding of past and present sins, the human penchant for warfare, abuse, and oppression, and the true war between humanity, the industrialized world, and the immense tolls of our shared land. Deeply personal, hauntingly prophetic, and bracingly sharp, the start to Bowden's harrowed quest to unearth our ugly truths remains strikingly poignant today.

• ISBN10: 0865476292
• ISBN13: 9780865476295
• Publish Date: 1 February 2002 (first published 8 August 1995)
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Imprint: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

When there’s one name I hear from Rick Bass, and Ed Abbey, and Elmore Leonard, and Harry Crews— I listen. No, scratch that. I can’t get it in my hands fast enough. Goddamn, they were right: Charles Bowden.

He says, “I speak for the mongrel, the mestizo, the half-breed, the bastard, the alley cat, the cur, the hybrid, the mule, the whore, the unforeseen strain that pounds against all the safe and disgusting doors. I speak for vitality, rough edges, torn fences, broken walls, wild rivers, sweat-soaked sheets. Who would want a world left mumbling to itself, a perfect garden with the dreaded outside, the fabled Other held at bay and the neat rows of cultures and genes safe behind some hedgerow? I dread a world that is all Iceland, the people fair, their genealogies stretching back in a dull column for a millennium, their folkways and mores and lifeways and deathways all smug and pointless. I speak for graffiti. Look there is Christopher, watch the son-of-a-bitch, watch’m, he’s got a spray can of paint and look what he’s writing on that temple wall…”

He says, “I’m proud to live in a nation without serious censorship. It is not necessary. We have all been trained. We don’t have anything to forget because we have remembered very little.”

He says, “I am keen about the dangers. Not out of fear but out of dread. The way I see it there are so many ways to fail and those failures are very difficult to see coming because they are all named success.”

He says, “What have I learned? That the land is good, bad, and indifferent but this never matters because it is all we have or ever can have.”

He says, “True, we could have done better— but then everything is like a love affair, everything could have been done better. But the mess we lament, that is the thing that a part of me celebrates.”

He says, “He began to cause trouble.” He says, “This is where I grew very fond of him: he caused trouble.”

The only thing is, I’m already notching his others on my belt and I think I’m going to find ones that surpass it.