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Sand, January 2009
Hardcover
The Never-Ending Story
University of California Press
January 2009
On Sale: January 15, 2009
360 pages ISBN: 0520254376 EAN: 9780520254374 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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