Lands of extremes, contrasts, metaphor and myth, deserts cover nearly a third of our planet’s land area and are home to more than half a billion people. The desert as an idea has long captured the Western imagination, but too often in ways that fail to grasp the true scope and diversity of these spaces and the realities of the lives of people for whom arid lands are home. For the outsider, stories of the desert are about the exotic, about adventures into hostile territory. Few of us consid...

From individual grains to desert dunes, from the bottom of the sea to the landscapes of Mars, and from billions of years in the past to the future, this is the extraordinary story of one of nature's humblest, most powerful, and most ubiquitous materials. Told by a geologist with a novelist's sense of language and narrative, Sand examines the science—sand forensics, the physics of granular materials, sedimentology, paleontology and archaeology, planetary exploration—and at the same...

Two soulmates embark on an around-the-world journey, leaving the security of their well-ordered lives in search of larger truths.Forty-seven years ago, Michael discovered his soulmate Deborah on a dance floor in Keene, New Hampshire. It took her soul a few years and an around-the-world bike trek to fully reciprocate. Riding the Edge is the astonishing tale of the six-month odyssey that profoundly shaped the next 564 months of their lives together.Taking place in 1980, Micha...