Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

With its evocative blend of nature and travel writing, philosophy and history, journalist Ben Ehrenreich's Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time merits favorable comparison with works like Annie Dillard's For the Time Being and broad swaths of recent writing by Rebecca Solnit.

Ehrenreich (The Way to the Spring) opens what reads like an enhanced collection of undated journal entries in November 2017. At the time, he and his partner shared a house in the California desert, only a few minutes from the entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. Several months later, he moves to Las Vegas to spend a semester at a literary institute. As he vividly describes it, there hardly could be a greater contrast between the "urgency, brilliance, and stubbornness of life" he comes to relish in the wild expanse of Joshua Tree and the soulless city of hotels and casinos carved from the "same desert, only paved."

But above everything, Ehrenreich's subject is time, or, more specifically, a critique of Western civilization's idea of progress. Citing the California wildfires of 2018 and the ocean rise that will swamp 153 million people by the end of this century, he argues that this "illusion of eternal, self-sustaining growth" has launched humankind on the path to eventual environmental destruction.

One comes away from Desert Notebooks not only with a deeper appreciation for some of America's wildest and most rugged spaces, but with a better sense of how we got to where we are and at least a glimmer of what an alternative path into the future might look like. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

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