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Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
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About This Book
Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, National Magazine Award winner Ben Ehrenreich presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time--"a beautiful meditation on adapting to future cataclysm" (Publishers Weekly). Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time--the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun. In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas's neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present--unflinching, urgent--yet timeless and profound.
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Reviews
"He's an elegant writer with a skill for capturing desert essences ..."
"Ehrenreich's scholarly reflections serve to locate the origin of America's present crisis in the atrocities of its founding; but the root causes he identifies are above all epistemological, and far older than America ..."
"All of these elements are skillfully melded in a work that's intellectually challenging, thoughtful and consistently surprising ..."
"The world is written, Ehrenreich shows, but we need to find the language to fully decipher its wonders and our place within them."
"Richly evocative, this is a book that begs to be reread, both for its biting social commentary and its wholly original contribution to the literature of planetary catastrophe."
"Along with a lyrical, freshly observed record of exploration, the author puts forth a manifesto against the prevalent, and destructive, notion of time—'the one that rules most of our lives and how we live them,' that insists on history as a linear progression exalting white Europeans, and that depends on 'the illusion of eternal, self-sustaining growth' to justify the exploitation of peoples and environments."
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