Books

Well, sometimes you just have to throw modesty to the dusty winds and
shamelessly take on a little self-promotion. The desert book was just reviewed
for The Geological Society by Andrew Goudie,
Emeritus Professor in Geography at Oxford, a leading international authority
on arid lands. The review is [available online](http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Geoscientist/Books-
Arts/Geoscientist-book-reviews-online/2015-Book-Reviews-Online/The-Desert-
Land-of-lost-borders-by-Michael-Welland) (it will be published in
Geoscientist in a couple of months), but here it is:

This handsome book is informative, well-illustrated, broad-ranging, and
clever. The author, a geologist and professional writer, who in 2009 wrote a
well-received book, ‘ Sand: A Journey through Science and the Imagination
’, has managed to weave together a whole array of different strands that
serve to make deserts what they are.

Using some of his own field experiences, coupled with a wide reading of the
literature, he has succeeded in covering the science of deserts (including
climate, geomorphology, and wildlife), while at the same time discussing the
human inhabitants of deserts, art and literature, and some of the arresting
characters who risked their lives in discovering and traversing the world’s
dryands.

It aims, as the author explains, to ‘provide an evocation, a celebration, a
consideration of our response to the desert, the idea of the desert’, for
‘deserts are landscapes of the mind as much as physical realities, places of
metaphor and myth.’ Using examples from central Australia, the Namib, the
Gobi, the Sahara, the Mojave and the Atacama, it examines such landscapes in
the context of their place in history, as birthplaces of civilizations,
evolutionary adaptations, art, ideology and philosophy. To be sure, it does
not cover everything relating to this vast topic, but it provides a superb
introduction to what makes deserts so fascinating and alluring.

To give an example of how different material is cleverly combined, consider
his treatment of flash floods. The climatic and geomorphological conditions
that produce them are described, there are some graphic descriptions from
the literature, but there is also a description of an explorer who was
killed by a flash flood in the Algerian Sahara, Isabelle Eberhardt. We learn
that she probably had syphilis, was illegitimate, was a habitual user of
drugs, was highly promiscuous, and cut her hair like a man.

Equally, some pervasive surface features - stone pavements - are explained
scientifically, but are also placed in the context of the disturbance of
desert surfaces in the Libyan Deserts by the narrow tyres of the Model T
Fords used by great desert explorers like Ralph Alger Bagnold. Similarly,
dust storms are introduced by a consideration of the life and writings of
Mildred Cable and her colleagues in the Gobi, but this is followed
seamlessly by a discussion of how the global importance of dust storms has
been revealed by the latest satellite-borne sensors.

Lovers of deserts will love this book and will also learn much from it.

Reviewed by Andrew Goudie, University of Oxford.

[Image from NASA:
A dust storm was blowing large quantities of dust out over the Persian Gulf
and Arabian Sea on Saturday, December 13, 2003. In this true-color composite
scene, acquired by the Terra and AquaModerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer
(MODIS) instruments, the dust storm (light brown pixels) can be seen extending
from the Arabian Peninsula (left) eastward over the Persian Gulf and the Gulf
of Oman toward the Arabian Sea. Parts of southern Afghanistan and much of
Pakistan are also covered by airborne dust.]

Originally published at: https://throughthesandglass.typepad.com/through_the_sandglass/books/