Title: Blues for cannibals
Subtitle: the notes from underground
Description: "Blues for Cannibals continues the quest Bowden began in Blood Orchid: to discover the headwaters of the sickness that seeps through the American soul, and to consider what it might mean to come fully alive in a time of exalted consumption, global pillage, gated communities, and wholesale destruction of the environment.

Down, down he leads us, in intoxicating, nearly hallucinogenic prose - past the Yaqui, the Anasazi, and other ghosts of our collective history, past the hookers, winos, and assorted have-nots outside the prosperous circle by the fire. We meet a prisoner obsessed with painting presidents, sex offenders whose desires are not as alien as we would wish, a murderer whose execution does not cure what ails us. "I wound up looking at a world where cannibalism is life," Bowden writes, "and of course, given the diet, a life without a future." He mourns a young artist who couldn't find a reason to keep living, and tends a mesquite tree that won't die.

And, down among its metaphoric roots, he reacquaints us with the appetites - fierce, flawed, human - that might save us too."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Cannibalism, Description and travel, Travel, American Authors, Political and social views, American National characteristics, Mesquite, Folklore, Social conditions, Moral conditions, Biography, New York Times reviewed, National characteristics, american, United states, description and travel, United states, moral conditions, United states, social conditions, 1980-, Authors, american
Places: United States
People: Charles Bowden (1945-)
Time periods: 1980-