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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
"One comes away from Desert Notebooks not only with a deeper appreciation for some of America's wildest and most rugged spaces, but with a better sense of how we got to where we are and at least a glimmer of what an alternative path into the future might look like."
"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."
"compelling stories ..."
"an erudite philosophical work ..."
"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."
"Desert Notebooks sometimes seems to aspire to the atomized condition of sand."
"Ehrenreich shows that deserts can make us wise in new ways."
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