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THE RED CADDY

Name: THE RED CADDY
Author: Charles Bowden
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1579-8

INTO THE UNKNOWN WITH EDWARD ABBEY

by Charles Bowden ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2018

A memoir about an American original by an American original, a literary journalist who merits more than a regional...

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An unflinchingly honest writer addresses the death of his friend and kindred spirit Edward Abbey (1927-1989).

Since Abbey’s death, he has been canonized as some sort of environmental saint, memorialized through what Bowden (Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez, 2010, etc.), who died in 2014, has called the “Dead Ed Industry,” which has made him a hero to many whom the author disparages as the “mush-headed-crystal-gazing-safe-sex-tofu-munching souls.” Like Abbey, Bowden was first considered a nature writer before turning his attention to drug wars and other violence across the Mexican border. Both had an ornery streak, with Bowden occasionally recalling a more disciplined Hunter S. Thompson, without the self-indulgence. He is cleareyed, and he pulls no punches, whether writing about “the seriously haunted ground” where he lives—“the earth here is dotted with ruins and from time to time you can feel the bony hands of the dead on your shoulders”—or describing the process of honoring his late friend: “I feel like I’m being asked to introduce a badass rap singer to a herd of seminary students.” This concise, pithy volume focuses on a panel discussion he reluctantly moderated to celebrate Abbey and raise funds. He then uses that event as a springboard for all sorts of memories and meditations on Abbey, his literary reputation, fame in general, and the posthumous sanitizing that has rendered this cantankerous anarchist as neutered and housebroken. “The only safe way to keep dead people dead,” writes Bowden, “is to forget they were ever alive and lived in a manner as messy and sad and happy as the rest of it.” Abbey lives within these pages, which Bowden wrote in 1994, shortly after the conference on Abbey. This belated publication should not only send readers back to Abbey, but also back to Bowden’s work.

A memoir about an American original by an American original, a literary journalist who merits more than a regional readership.

Pub Date: April 25, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-4773-1579-8

Page Count: 112

Publisher: Univ. of Texas

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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SONATA
by Charles Bowden

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EL SICARIO
translated by Molly Molloy edited by Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy

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MURDER CITY
by Charles Bowden

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.