Sand: The Never-Ending Story
by Michael Welland
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael WellandEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-01-15
ISBN: 0520254376
Number of pages: 360
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Reviews of Sand: The Never-Ending Story
Book Review: You think you know your world?
Summary: 5 Stars
Startling! That's the word that comes immediately to mind when thinking of this book. I was startled into laughter three times before I reached page 13 and startled by snippets of information provided in the same 13 pages. With no real science background and my only flirtation with geology being Roadside Geology of Colorado, I'm not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn't this highly entertaining and very readable book. I thought I knew something about sand since I grew up with a beach as part of my front yard, but I soon realized that I knew almost nothing about sand. For example, there are pictures in this book of some of the organisms that live in beach sand. My reaction? Oooh, yuck. No more walking on beaches for me. However, when I got to the chapter on desert sands, including some of the denizens of deserts, I decided beach sand isn't so bad after all.
This book is jam-packed with fascinating information. By the end of the book, I felt that Sand, the book, had filled every nook and cranny of my life, as sand, the substance, has a tendency to do. I would pick up a piece of information from Sand, only to find it emphasized by something else in my life. A case in point is sand forensics. I had never heard of the concept, which was surprising considering how many mysteries I have read and watched over the years. Mr. Welland gives a fascinating example of sand forensics in his book, and lo and behold, the next mystery I pick up (the fourth Lee Child) has the FBI determining where the kidnapper's truck had originated and where it had traveled based on the sand and mud clinging to the bottom of the truck. Sand forensics. Mr. Welland also lists many examples of sand referenced in literature. I had never been particularly aware of this and thought he must have been really searching for these references to have found so many. Except that I was reading Mark Twain's biography at the time and guess what? In chapter six, Mr. Clemens refers to life as being like sand, soon washing away. Okay, I guess I wasn't noticing all these references to sand in literature after all. But when I visited Camano Island in Washington (state) and saw two whales, inexplicably close to shore where I had seen nothing but sand only hours before during low tide, I could not understand what the whales were doing. The water roiled all around them but they couldn't have been in more than four feet of water. The next morning I picked up Sand to continue and the very next paragraph was about gray whales in the water off the coast of Washington scraping their bellies through sand to create sand flurries from which they could feed on ghost shrimp. Unbelievable! But I knew I was in real trouble when I took a cup from the middle of my huge box of Cheer, watched the sides cascade down to the middle, and thought to myself, "Avalanche!".
Other intriguing things about Sand? It reads like an exotic travelogue of places I have never heard of before as well as some that I am familiar with. Fascinating. Also, Mr. Welland occasionally gives his geology human characteristics, which makes the book more compelling in my view. Here's an example from page 248 of his book. "As from time immemorial, while the mountains rose, the elements chastised them for doing so, eating into the newly exposed rocks, eroding and destroying them." What a picture! He also personalizes the book in places. I loved his reference to Bernie, the taxi driver, who I am now anxious to meet, and his mention of his own love of wine, often grown in sand, to name a few instances. The book also piqued my curiosity to the point that I actually looked up a reference in his book, fortunately footnoted, so that I could easily get more information on the subject, in this case, hot air balloons floated over the Pacific to the US carrying explosives from Japan during World War II. And for those of us who saw Master and Commander and wondered how long that huge hourglass took to pour from one side to the other while on watch (I assumed it took an hour; hence the name hourglass), they will find the answer in this remarkable book. Finally, his understated but pointed remarks throughout the book on what humans are doing to their environment were both scary and refreshing. Scary because it makes it sound as if even sand, at least as we know it, may not after all be a never-ending story, and refreshing because the way he makes his remarks is believable rather than soapbox oratory, which most of us have learned to distrust.
This book is definitely one to put on your re-read shelves. Even reading it slowly, I'm sure I missed more than I retained, and I don't plan to take sand for granted ever again. One of the references in the first thirteen pages that made me laugh was the one about sand smuggling, but by the end of the book, I understood so much more about sand that I no longer felt the idea was laughable when it was re-introduced.
I read over three hundred books a year, mostly fiction. Last year, for the first time in my life, someone asked me what my favorite book of that year was. I had to think for about thirty seconds to answer, "Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose". If someone asks me that same question this year, I won't have to think for one second to answer, "Sand, the Never-Ending Story by Michael Welland". Oddly enough, they are both non-fiction. Go figure.
Summary of Sand: The Never-Ending Story
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 novelist's sense of language and narrative, Sand examines the science--sand forensics, the physics of granular materials, sedimentology, paleontology and archaeology, planetary exploration--and at the same time explores the rich human context of sand. Interwoven with tales of artists, mathematicians, explorers, and even a vampire, the story of sand is an epic of environmental construction and destruction, an adventure in staggering scales of time and distance, yet a tale that encompasses the ordinary and everyday. Sand, in fact, is all around us--it has made possible our computers, buildings and windows, toothpaste, cosmetics, and paper, and it has played dramatic roles in human history, commerce, and imagination. In this luminous, kinetic, revelatory account, we do indeed find the world in a grain of sand.World Books
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