Sand

By Michael Welland,

Book cover of Sand: The Never-Ending Story

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Sand as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Sand (yes, that grainy stuff at the beach that never fully gets out of your shoes) is a ubiquitous feature of dream-vacations, and yet is a really obscure topic to study. Michael Welland managed to present a fascinating and thought-provoking story of where sand comes from and where it goes. But this book isn’t only about sand; it is about the unimaginable timescales of geology and how a countless number of tiny grains can fill nearly 400,000 miles of beaches, not to mention deserts, ocean floors, and volcanos. Welland’s writing style is poetic and flowing, and overall a joy to…

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Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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