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A review by chrislatray
Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time by Ben Ehrenreich
4.0
I have had an ongoing love affair with the deserts of the American Southwest for nearly two decades now and I take my reading related to it both seriously and critically. With DESERT NOTEBOOKS, Ben Ehrenreich delivers a new contribution to the canon of essential reading about the place and the rest of the world as it relates to it.
Ehrenreich isn't writing a "desert book" per se, but he is writing from the Mojave, and his love for it is deep. As climate change flexes its dark might around him, and Donald Trump (named here as "The Rhino") wreaks his havoc, Ehrenreich delves into histories of the first inhabitants; the history of writing; philosophy, and ... owls. Sounds like a mash-up, and it is, but it works.
Sometimes journalists-turned-authors produce work that simply reads like a collection of reported pieces sewn together with a half-baked attempt at a narrative thread. Ehrenreich avoids that trap; this man is a storyteller. The mix of science, myth, anecdotes, and a profound love for the terrain produces one of my favorite reads of the spring thus far, if not the year.
Ehrenreich isn't writing a "desert book" per se, but he is writing from the Mojave, and his love for it is deep. As climate change flexes its dark might around him, and Donald Trump (named here as "The Rhino") wreaks his havoc, Ehrenreich delves into histories of the first inhabitants; the history of writing; philosophy, and ... owls. Sounds like a mash-up, and it is, but it works.
Sometimes journalists-turned-authors produce work that simply reads like a collection of reported pieces sewn together with a half-baked attempt at a narrative thread. Ehrenreich avoids that trap; this man is a storyteller. The mix of science, myth, anecdotes, and a profound love for the terrain produces one of my favorite reads of the spring thus far, if not the year.