Sand: The Never-Ending Story

I seem to be in deep science mode in my reading recently, a tethering of poetry and science, "scientopic" if you will. Welland's exhaustively comprehensive book about sand is endlessly fascinating; everything you ever wanted to know as well as everything you never knew you wanted to know about sand: its physics, chemistry, evolution & biology, as well as its cultural, imaginal, & literary dimensions & multiple identities. Very well written, evocative and immensely engaging.

A dense and weighty text in keeping with its eponymous subject, yet entirely readable and entertaining. The photographs, figures and color plates add tremendously to Welland's explanation of the structure, character and movement of sand. The best chapter, Servant - Sand in Our Lives, is an A (for abrasive) through Z (for Zen garden) of sand's ubiquitously functional presence, without which neither the natural world nor man's constructions could be as we know them.

Welland's 'Sand' has the potential to be one of those great books that illuminate some aspect of the natural world that we take for granted. He has the credentials, he is a geologist, and he has a fascination with sand, and - oddly enough - he has a fascinating subject that presents many aspects and angles. He writes with passion too, and it makes this an entertaining read - in parts. What is lacking in this book is 'pace'. If his publisher had been a little more sympathetic to the subject we could have had a great many more illustrations, diagrams and maps. And if his editor had been a little more in tune with the needs of the reader we might have had a lot more of Welland's excellent and entertaining anecdotes about his, and other's, show more experiences with sand. As it stands the story is a bit too dry in parts, too laboured. Resorting to a 'A to Z of Sand' chapter (as he does) is simply - too my mind - sweeping up the aspects of the story that he couldn't fit in elsewhere. But they should have fitted in elsewhere if this was a smooth flowing (and gripping) narrative. So in the end this is a somewhat disjointed gem. Worth reading, but with a little regret for what it could have been... show less