White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World (First Edition.)

From ';one of our most original writers' (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine) comes an expansive and exacting bookfirmly grounded but elegant, often hilarious, and always inquisitiveabout travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.

Geoff Dyer's restless searchfor what? is unclear, even to himcontinues in this series of fascinating adventures and pilgrimages: with a tour guide who may not be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D.

H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his ';greatest experience from the outside world'; with a hitchhiker picked up on the way from White Sands; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries ';to work out what a certain placea certain way of marking the landscapemeans; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for.'With 4 pages of full-color illustrations.From the Hardcover edition.