Inferno (Bill and Alice Wright Photography Series) - Hardcover

Winner, Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2007 Runner-up, Honorable Mention, Orion Book Award, 2007 Charles Bowden has been an outspoken advocate for the desert Southwest since the 1970s. Recently his activism helped persuade the U.S. government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument in southern Arizona. But in working for environmental preservation, Bowden refuses to be one who "outline[s] something straightforward, a manifesto with clear rules and a set of plans for others to follow." In this deeply personal book, he brings the Sonoran Desert alive, not as a place where well-meaning people can go to enjoy "nature," but as a raw reality that defies bureaucratic and even literary attempts to define it, that can only be experienced through the senses. Inferno burns with Charles Bowden's passion for the desert he calls home. "I want to eat the dirt and lick the rock. Or leave the shade for the sun and feel the burning. I know I don't belong here. But this is the only place I belong," he says. His vivid descriptions, complemented by Michael Berman's acutely observed photographs of the Sonoran Desert, make readers feel the heat and smell the dryness, see the colors in earth and sky, and hear the singing of dry bones across the parched ground. Written as "an antibiotic" during the time Bowden was lobbying the government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Inferno repudiates both the propaganda and the lyricism of contemporary nature writing. Instead, it persuades us that "we need these places not to remember our better selves or our natural self or our spiritual self. We need these places to taste what we fear and devour what we are. We need these places to be animals because unless we are animals we are nothing at all. That is the price of being a civilized dude."

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. He wrote The Red Caddy in 1994. Michael P. Berman is a photographer and artist who lives in San Lorenzo, New Mexico. His work is in the permanent collections of many American museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.