In our imagination, the desert is a scorching flatland, a palm grove like a shimmering green line floating in the distance, an ocean of dunes. You can close your eyes to see it.

When William Langewiesche set out to document the state of the Sahara desert he was determined to see just what came before his eyes: nothing more or less. The result is an unsentimentalized, often startling account of the desert.

From the southernmost Mediterranean to the African Savannah and west to the Atlantic, Langewiesche's trek took him through the hyper-arid core of the desert, a terrain that taunts the imagination with its unalterable desolation.

Here cadavers decompose like sun-dried dates, horizons are so barren that stones are mistaken for trucks, distances so empty that migrating birds have been observed seeking the company of humans. Langewiesche's descriptions of the physical desert are brilliantly matched by his explorations of its psychological landscape: the bitter colonial history, the stoicism of the nomads, the austerity of Islam.

Despite the passing of the camel and the caravan, the Sahara remains without compromise. William Langewiesche blends history and reportage, anthropology and anecdote, into an unforgettable portrait of the unsubdued heart of the Sahara unveiled.

Material reprinted with permission of the author and the author's agent, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agency, © William Langewiesche - All Rights Reserved. - William Langewiesche is a Contributing Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, where his writing on the Sahara first appeared. Sahara Unveiled is available in hardcover from Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., and can be ordered on-line through Amazon.com. - Quotations are from "The Physics of Blown Sand & Desert Dunes" by R.A. Bagnold (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1942) and were reprinted with permission of Chapman and Hall.
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