Confessional, contemplative, intellectually adventurous, Ben Ehrenreich’s Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time is a worthy addition to the library of American aridity.

Ehrenreich remembers a speech given by the president after his first State of the Union address, in which he lamented the difficulty of unifying the country. 'Without a major event where people pull together,' Trump said, 'that’s hard to do.' That “Desert Notebooks was written before the coming of Covid-19 only makes it feel more, rather than less, timely. Read two months into lockdown, it feels creepily prescient: We are all living in the desert now.

With its evocative blend of nature and travel writing, philosophy and history, journalist Ben Ehrenreich's Desert Notebooks merits favorable comparison with works like Annie Dillard's For the Time Being and broad swaths of recent writing by Rebecca Solnit. All of these elements are skillfully melded in a work that's intellectually challenging, thoughtful and consistently surprising.

... exceptional.

Richly evocative, this is a book that begs to be reread, both for its biting social commentary and its wholly original contribution to the literature of planetary catastrophe..

Ben Ehrenreich’s new book, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, is no doubt lively and expansive.

... a thoughtful, often stirring, meditation on nature, myth, philosophy, politics, and time from the vantage of two starkly different desert environments: the 'surging beauty' of Joshua Tree National Park and the assaulting seediness of Las Vegas.

... an erudite philosophical work.