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Published Jul 2020
336 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
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.
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? 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. 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. For readers of Robert Macfarlane or Elizabeth Rush, Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present―unflinching, urgent― yet timeless and profound.
"Along with a lyrical, freshly observed record of exploration, the author puts forth a manifesto against the prevalent, and destructive, notion of time...that insists on history as a linear progression exalting white Europeans...to justify the exploitation of peoples and environments...Well-informed and -rendered, passionate reflections on humanity's prospects." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Suggesting that humanity must go beyond 'the stories that have been winning out these last two-hundred-and-change-years,' Ehrenreich creates a beautiful meditation on adapting to future cataclysm." - Publishers Weekly
"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." - Library Journal
"It's been a long time since I read anything as exciting and illuminating as Ben Ehrenreich's superb new book, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time. Very few writers have addressed the current planetary crisis as powerfully and insightfully as Ehrenreich does. The book is extraordinary as much for the rigor of its thinking as for the manner of its writing." - Amitav Ghosh
"Ehrenreich's Mojave is both eternal and despoiled, a measuring rod for the apocalypse, and proof that nature abides. Progress, he explains to us, is like one of those strange paved streets in the desert running through phantom, unbuilt subdivisions. The pavement ends abruptly, and we find ourselves lost in the furnace-hot badlands of the Present where time and meaning are twisted into enigmatic and terrifying forms that recall the end-time visions of cultures vanquished by 'civilization.' This haunting meditation on terminal capitalism and its unthinkable future clearly establishes its author as one of our greatest essayists, wholly contemporary with these strange times." - Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz
"Ben Ehrenreich's stunning Desert Notebooks combs through history, literature, myth, physics, and ecology to understand how we got here, and how we might find our way out, into forms of time that are made not of our thralldom to capital and petroleum but of our relationships to each other, to our fellow creatures, to plants and rocks and landscapes, and to the stars and sun and moon overhead. Ben Ehrenreich wants you to join him here, on earth. The thrill of Desert Notebooks is that in its lucid pages such a miracle seems almost possible." - Anthony McCann, author of Shadowlands
This information about Desert Notebooks was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ben Ehrenreich writes about climate change for the Nation. His work has appeared in Harper's magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, and Los Angeles magazine. In 2011, he was awarded a National Magazine Award. His last book, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, based on his reporting from the West Bank, was one of the Guardian's Best Books of 2016. He is also the author of two novels, Ether and The Suitors.
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