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.
