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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.
Reviews
"Ehrenreich remembers a speech given by the president after his first State of the Union address, in which he lamented the difficulty of unifying the country."
"It's a fascinating journey in the company of Ehrenreich and a diverse group of eminent writers that include Jorge Luis Borges and Walter Benjamin, and others lesser known but equally compelling, whose work he handles with a comfortable facility."
"The prose is at its best in the desert ..."
"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."
"It's as if your desert road trip was morphing into a graduate seminar, with everybody in the car talking about Hegel when all you want is to take the next exit, grab a Coke at the Circle K and make Zabriskie Point by sunset...Yet it works."
"a thoughtful, often stirring, meditation on nature, myth, philosophy, politics, and time from the vantage of two starkly different desert environments: the 'surging beauty' of Joshua Tree National Park and the assaulting seediness of Las Vegas ..."
"compelling stories ..."
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