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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 creates a beautiful meditation on adapting to future cataclysm."
"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."
"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."
"To observe that these notes from arid America, vivid though they are, lack weight is not a criticism, since they are really only the framework for a series of learned, arcane, startlingly original mini-essays — on Mayan cosmology, on colonialism, on black holes, on the racist elisions and misdirections of ethnologists, and on the suppression and distortion of Indigenous knowledge."
"He's an elegant writer with a skill for capturing desert essences ..."
"Ehrenreich is a bold choreographer, skipping from black holes and Mayan myths to the 'breathtaking racism' of Hegel and mystic wheels in the stories of Borges ..."
"Well-informed and -rendered, passionate reflections on humanity's prospects."
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