Grains Of Sand

Oct 24, 2024 9:37 AM

Author:Martin Buckley

Grains Of Sand

Driven by a desire to explore the most remote, barren yet romantic places on earth, Martin Buckley set off on a two-year journey through the world's deserts. In the Sahara he was threatened with murder. In the Gobi, he hijacked a cycle-rickshaw. Dehydrating in the Sonora, he hallucinated fruit cocktails. Encountering the desert at its most extreme, he learned how to find water - and how to spit tobacco into a camel's nostril.Images of the desert exert a powerful grip on the human imagination, from Lawrence of Arabia to Star Wars. Deserts feel familiar, yet mysterious. The truth is that they are even stranger than we imagine.GRAINS OF SAND is a passionate, profound and frequently funny evocation of the world's deserts and the people who live in them; an extraordinary global adventure, and a personal voyage of discovery.

Reviews

A rallying cry to reclaim lost routes and preserve this precious resource for future generations

—— Walk Magazine

A celebration of an ancient network and a rallying cry to reclaim what has been lost and preserve it for future generations.

—— The Best of UK

One of the year's most original and outstanding books...fascinating labyrinths of history and human experience, which he perceptively, intructively and absorbingly explores. This is a read to relish

—— Financial Times

Theodore Zeldin's all-embracing history of our feelings throughout the ages [is] brilliantly original and unsettling... His scope is dazzling... A seductive and unusually thought provoking book

—— Sunday Telegraph

Bubbling wit... Zeldin makes life exciting for the reader. It is like being on some careering fair-ground ride that whirls you from one limelit fragment of civilisation to the next at breakneck speed...gatecrashing all the cultures of the world

—— Spectator

It's the sort of book that will go on being famous long after we're all dead... If ever a volume deserved that overused ecomium "this book will change your life", it is this one

—— Oxford Today

'Exhilarating'

—— Melvyn Bragg , Observer

'As enthralling in its own way as was Darwin's original'

—— Kenan Malik , Independent on Sunday

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