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    Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
    Unavailable
    Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
    Unavailable
    Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
    Ebook373 pages7 hours

    Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

    By Ben Ehrenreich

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, this New York Times Notable Book presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time.

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateJul 7, 2020
    ISBN9781640093546
    Author

    Ben Ehrenreich

    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 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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    Reviews for Desert Notebooks

    2.5/5

    10 ratings3 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I picked up this book because it was recommended to me twice, and because it is (partially) about time.I think my main issue with this book is that it is poorly suited for this format. It reads like a realtime serial, and I think it could excel in this format (such as via a SubStack or blog). The author is constantly referencing current events (which are no longer current nor relevant), as well as notes from hikes, looking out his window, and the latest Wikipedia article that has taken his fancy. There's nothing wrong as this as the content to form a body of work—it is just not good as a book.What is this book about? The primary inquiry seems to be related to time.Generally, I dislike when people attempt to place this moment in the arc of history. Inevitably, these arcs elevate or denigrate other peoples and cultures in a sporadic fashion, due to the impossibility of history ever being any more than a splotchy approximation of the past, full of huge gaps and placing the emphasis in unmerited places. This book does some of this. It is something I dislike because it is an ontology that creates external cultural authorities (in this case, authorities that are of other times), which undermines the agency of our own time and own culture (which, of course, has influences from other times, but is also distinct). I also dislike this practice because it reinforces dominant paradigms around time. What if we had an "efficient history" theory, similar to the efficient markets theory—which would say that, all history is already fully integrated into the present, and therefore, any comments about history will necessarily be less accurate than the ways in which it has already implicitly shaped present circumstances?I am fascinated by non-dominant conceptions of time. Unfortunately, the author only seems to highlight more-or-less three modalities: 1) linear, 2) cyclical, 3) apocalyptic. I'm deeply familiar with all three of these modalities already, and am interested in more intuitive theories of time. For example, even though it wasn't explicit, in reading Andreas Weber's "The Biology of Wonder," I got the sense that time is an artifact of life. In other words, non-living objects (by Weber's definition), such as Weber, can perceive and bring attention to across the entirety of their existence across time. In other words, for a rock, time doesn't plod along from moment to moment, but is rather, holographic. This, in turn, destroys the life-centric view of time. Since rocks don't need to worry about reproduction and mortality, they have no need for the mental construct of a "moment in time." Anyways, why isn't Ehrenreich writing more about this, or interestingly intriguing and enlightening subjects?To come back to the text again—the current events of the beforetimes (before COVID) seem so innocent. I found it challenging to sympathize with our authors concerns—not because they're unmerited, but because they've been overshadowed by my own "current events." If Ehrenreich thought the Trump presidency was apocalyptic, I'm not sure what superlatives are left to describe our current era.
    • 2/5
      Really horribly written book.
    • 2/5
      Disappointing. I don't even have any good quotes bookmarked. It reads much like somebody's "notebooks", and I guess I should have taken the title more literally, but I'd been expecting something a little more coherent. Ehrenreich spends about half the book reporting from Joshua Tree, and the other half from Las Vegas where he is temporarily living due to having earned a fellowship there. The book is best describing the desert; his love for Joshua Tree shines through. Naturally, Las Vegas is described as being like some circle of hell. It's so miserable to read; I get it, Vegas is crazy horrible, but you're presumably there for a reason, right? The institution that hired you, your colleagues, surely there is some beauty or bright spot to be found? COULD WE HEAR ABOUT IT? Likewise, the guy seems to have the biggest horror movie scrolling on his phone's Twitter feed. He's always putting in asides where he looks at his phone and sees somebody being decapitated or watches the polar ice caps melt before his eyes; and again I wanted to shout, STEP AWAY FROM THE PHONE, DUDE. You don't HAVE to subscribe to these horrible things. You don't even have to be on Twitter! Sorry, I am probably missing some deep, dark beauty enveloped in this book, but it obviously didn't find me.