A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior by Charles Bowden

Abstract

b o o k R e v ie w s 2 2 9 tion at bay. Daniel’s dry humor is often self-deprecating. He describes himself returning from grouse hunting “with no grouse but with a theory of grouse,” namely that grouse know when to hide because they can detect the swagger­ ing step of an armed man (44). He imagines a visit from Thoreau, who wants to know why Daniel needs so many things. Daniel yields little ground, though, to the young man who wrote Walden (1854); at age fifty-two, Daniel has more experience and different preoccupations. Imagining a visit from his late father, Daniel visualizes how the elder man would have struggled to understand his son’s inclinations and choices. Franz Daniel was a charismatic leader, able organizer, and tireless fighter, committed to a cause; he withstood family tragedy and his own alcoholism. John Daniel, not a fighter but nevertheless a man of principle, refused to report for induction during the Vietnam War. The father was passionately engaged in struggle; the son drifted, continually examining his own motivations. Through the memoir strand within his journal, Daniel brings father and son into focus and, without minimizing their differences, establishes many points of reconciliation. Troubled Intimacies and Rogue River Journal deserve attentive reading—to enjoy the deft, evocative use of language and to reflect on these writers’ wellearned insights into our relationship with the natural world and to each other. Both books exemplify the importance of “being here,” fully aware of the pres­ ent place and moment, as we also increase our awareness of history, ecology, and, in Axelrod’s words, “the powerful healing capacity of our actions when we take responsibility for the previous harm we have caused” (161). A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior. By Charles Bowden. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2005. 310 pages, $24-00. Reviewed by David Cremean Black Hills State University, Spearfish, South Dakota The Jack Dykinga photograph of Charles Bowden gracing the inside rear jacket of A Shadow in the City is the author at sixty, not a younger version of the man typical of most book photos. The eyes glint with ornery humor, but they also read as darkly knowing, so the wear and wrinkles on his face reveal far more than where the smiles have been, as the tortured Mark Twain claimed, little doubt facetiously. As they should: Bowden is the nation’s preeminent literary prophet, America’s Amos, the one who tells it like it really is amid the age’s dominant and rampant informational irresponsibilities, as he has for at least the last seventeen years since the 1989 death of his friend, another voice in America’s wilderness, Edward Abbey. This Amos’s home is Tucson, not Israel, so in A Shadow in the City, Bowden writes instead about a western city he leaves unnamed in order to protect its principal focus, a longtime undercover drug agent identified by the w e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 pseudonym Joey O’Shay. According to Bowden, this book and its immediate predecessor— the brooding opus Down by the River (2002), for which he re­ mortgaged his house—finalize his decade-long immersion in the dangers and darknesses of the drug world. Also like River, it occasionally reaches beyond the American West and into Mexico, South America, and the power chambers and cities of the United States, reminding readers that the world has long had a global economy. Overall this book differs sharply from River, thus providing a different perspective on things narcotic. Bowden, never one to rest safely either in life or art, takes numerous literary chances here. These are best summed up by noting that they are novelistic. The result is a serious testament about not only the insanity of the big money, big business drug wars and their addictive pull for all sides involved in them, but also another of the author’s important explorations of the American West’s underbelly. As Bowden writes near the book’s...