Red Line - Softcover

Bowden, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140145486 ISBN 13: 9780140145489

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1991

Synopsis

An often surreal memoir retraces the path of the Gold Rush, stumbles upon a charismatic Arizona sage, and searches after a border-town drug dealer as it portrays an American Southwest on the verge of ruin

About this title

About the Author

Author of many acclaimed books about the American Southwest and US-Mexico border issues, Charles Bowden (1945–2014) was a contributing editor for GQ, Harper’s, Esquire, and Mother Jones and also wrote for the New York Times Book Review, High Country News, and Aperture. His honors included a PEN First Amendment Award, Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, and the Sidney Hillman Award for outstanding journalism that fosters social and economic justice.

From Publishers Weekly

The Southwest as portrayed in this Kerouac-esque odyssey betokening the death of the American frontier spirit is a landscape of broken dreams, violence, uprooted lives and fallen idols. Bowden ( Mezcal ), joined by a retired narcotics cop, sets out to investigate the murder of a Mexican drug dealer/hit-man outside Tucson. His obsessive, detective-like quest seems at least partly an evasion of personal problems--he has just fathered a baby out of wedlock. We meet real estate developers, sullen Indians, assorted castoffs, a Vietnam vet, a rogue archeologist and, through historical flashbacks, gold-crazed '49ers. Miles distant from tourist-poster images of the Sunbelt, this vista of narrow greed, diminished expectations and despoilation of nature sizzles with the harsh, unrelenting glare of a hyperrealist painting.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0140145486
• ISBN 13: 9780140145489
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208