The Immeasurable World
Journeys in Desert Places
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In the classic literary tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Geoff Dyer, and for readers of Ryszard Kapuscinski and Rory Stewart, a rich and exquisitely written account of travels in eight deserts on five continents that evokes the timeless allure of these remote and forbidding places and their inhabitants.
One-third of the earth's land surface is classified as desert. Restless, unhappy in love, and intrigued by the Desert Fathers who forged Christian monasticism in the Egyptian desert, William Atkins decided to travel in six of the world's driest, hottest places: the Empty Quarter of Oman, the Gobi and Taklamakan Desert of northwest China, the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, the man-made desert of the Aral Sea in Kazkahstan, and the Black Rock and Sonoran Deserts of the American Southwest, and Egypt's Eastern Desert. Each of his travel narratives effortlessly weaves aspects of natural history, historical background, and present-day reportage into a compelling tapestry that reveals the human appeal of these often inhuman landscapes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Atkins takes readers on a thoroughly enjoyable tour of the world's deserts. After a breakup with his girlfriend of four years and a week spent with Cistercian monks in southwest England, Atkins (The Moor) became obsessed with deserts. His fascination began when he read, in the monastery's well-stocked library, accounts of desert explorers and he soon became consumed with the desire to "stand in the desert... and imagine what it might to do to a person who abandoned himself to it." And so began an odyssey that took Atkins to eight deserts across the globe: the Empty Quarter in Oman, the Gobi and Taklamakan in China, Australia's Great Victoria, the Aral Sea area in Kazakhstan, the Black Rock and Sonoran in the U.S., and Egypt's Eastern Desert. Interspersed with his own adventures are tales of those who have gone before him, such as Christian missionary Mildred Cable, who traveled the Gobi desert at the turn of the 20th century. Atkins also takes a contemporary look at deserts, describing, for example, the setting of the Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Atkins infuses his travel writing with poetic prose (he describes the Great Australian Bight as "a callused web of skin between two digits") to describe the beauty of what many consider to be wastelands. Atkins's thoughtful book is a wonderfully satisfying travelogues.
