White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

From “one of our most original writers” (Kathryn Schulz, <i>New York</i> magazine) comes an expansive and exacting book—firmly grounded but elegant, often hilarious, and always inquisitive—about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.<br />  <br /> Geoff Dyer’s restless search—<i>for what? </i>is unclear, even to him—continues 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.<br />  <br /> 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 place—a certain way of marking the landscape—means; what it’s trying to tell us; what we go to it for.”<br /><br /><i>With 4 pages of full-color illustrations.</i><br /><br /><br /><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>