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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
July 7, 2020 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781666554380
- File size: 337164 KB
- Duration: 11:42:25
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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AudioFile Magazine
Narrator David Bendena succeeds in animating this provocative, nonlinear audiobook with his careful tone, judicious pace, close reading, and forward-moving cadence. He narrates Ehrenreich's musings, reports, descriptions, and commentary with enough urgency to capture the author's apocalyptic take on the fate of the planet (warning: it may already be too late); the political moment (he dubs Trump "the Rhino"), and his own personal journey from the remote Joshua Tree to dizzying Vegas. Nature, the desert, the convulsions of the land--ranging from overheating to wildfires to unexpected profusions of Painted Lady butterflies--share space in this auspicious audiobook--as do philosophy, literary analysis, and an ongoing and fascinating preoccupation with time itself. DESERT NOTEBOOKS arrives at a most opportune time. It is strong medicine for an aching world. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine -
Publisher's Weekly
March 2, 2020
Nation columnist Ehrenreich (The Way to the Spring) critiques notions of progress he sees as having brought civilization to the point of disaster in an erudite philosophical work about the prospect of climate change. Against the backdrop of his wanderings through the Mojave Desert and a bleakly rendered Las Vegas, he juxtaposes stories from indigenous cultures—both of creation and of the devastating arrival of Westerners—with explanations of how modern Western thought developed, such as the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time, or of hourly pay during the Industrial Revolution. He also includes passages in which he reacts to the latest disturbing environmental and geopolitical news. The prose is at its best in the desert, where, for instance, “little jeweled crickets,” dead and encrusted in salt, lay scattered in Death Valley. Coming upon a 12,000-year-old creosote bush prompts Ehrenreich to reflect that time might be understood “as a circle that expands out of sight, invisible roots that grow and grow even as the parts we can see die off.” Suggesting that humanity must go beyond “the stories that have been winning out these last two-hundred-and-change-years,” Ehrenreich creates a beautiful meditation on adapting to future cataclysm.
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