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Praise for Desert Notebooks
“These are the kind of conversations we need to be having—with ourselves and with others. And the desert seems like the right austere setting to be having them. These fine essays take a deep tradition in American writing and extend it into our uncertain and collapsing present.”
—BILL MCKIBBEN, author of Falter and The End of Nature
“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
“Ehrenreich creates a beautiful meditation on adapting to future cataclysm.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The past few years of an accelerated, increasingly destructive climate crisis have brought a number of books that struggle to respond accordingly to a crisis of such magnitude; several writers have met this existential challenge with an equally existential discussion of the ways that the climate crisis affects our understanding of human history and time itself. Ben Ehrenreich, a columnist for The Nation, takes this discussion to the American southwest, examining the intersection of science, mythology, and landscape in the desert, in particular in Joshua Tree and Las Vegas. In these settings, Ehrenreich’s book reflects on the ways that the prospect of extinction has affected our understanding of time, and how we use that shift in perspective as we move forward.”
—CORINNE SEGAL, Literary Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year
“Ben Ehrenreich walked the deserts of the Occupied Territories for his previous book; in Desert Notebooks, he takes us with him into the Mojave—its coyotes, creosote, and Joshua trees. He descends barrancas and canyons, hikes boulder-strewn slopes into labyrinthine stacks of Jorge Luis Borges’s great Library, from which he draws out stories from that time ‘when animals were people,’ narratives by the Chemehuevi, the Serrano, the Mohave, and other desert peoples. These echo in texts by Martin Bernal, Walter Benjamin, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Jakob Böhme’s mystical touchstone—The Signature of All Things—as well as James Mooney’s classic, the Ghost Dance and the Sioux revolt of 1890. Climate change California is burning as Ehrenreich’s meditations prismatically refract heat, smoke, and light. Desert Notebooks is a book for our time—that is, a time scorched by harsh solar rays, shimmering in searing, phosphorescent prose.”
—SESSHU FOSTER, author of ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines
“The crisis humanity faces is total. It’s planetary. It’s a crisis in space and also in time. How close are we to the end? Is this land we stand on going to be inhabitable in one hundred years, sixty, forty? In sharply featured, compelling prose—the landscape writing here has the heartbreaking clarity of the experience of desert light—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
“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; its form both narrates and performs the crisis, while also exploring its antecedents. It is, among other things, a remarkable venture in intellectual history, especially in its juxtaposition of the pre-Columbian mythologies of the Americas with the post-Enlightenment mythologies of progress that remade the continents.”
—AMITAV GHOSH
ALSO BY BEN EHRENREICH
NONFICTION
The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine
FICTION
Ether
The Suitors
Desert Notebooks
Copyright © 2020 by Ben Ehrenreich
First hardcover edition: 2020
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Portions of this book appeared in different form in The Baffler.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Rutgers University Press for excerpts from Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1) and Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Linguistic Evidence, Volume 3) by Martin Bernal (1987, 2006); Malki Museum Press for excerpts from Mirror and Pattern: George Laird’s World of Chemehuevi Mythology by Carobeth Laird (1969), excerpts from Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of My Life with John Peabody Harrington by Carobeth Laird (1975), and excerpts from The Chemehuevis by Carobeth Laird (1976); Copper Canyon Press for excerpt from “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation” from When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz (2012); and Contra Mundum Press for excerpts from Eternity by the Stars: An Astronomical Hypothesis by Louis Auguste Blanqui, translated by Frank Chouraqui (2013)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ehrenreich, Ben, author.
Title: Desert notebooks : a road map for the end of time / Ben Ehrenreich.
Description: Berkeley : Counterpoint Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019047033 | ISBN 9781640093539 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Desert ecology—Mojave Desert. | Climatic changes—Mojave Desert.
Classification: LCC QH541.5.D4 E37 2020 | DDC 577.5409794/95—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047033
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Jordan Koluch
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