The Immeasurable World can be read in this way, as a series of passionate, eloquent dispatches from the hungry sands. Atkins ... tries to experience them all as directly as possible, raw to the ground, meeting the people and sharing the hardships. In all cases, he's acutely aware of the long histories of the places he's visiting ... But the principle joy of his book is the immediacy of its portraits; he talks engagingly with all walks of people living in deserts and often fighting for deserts ... Whether or not readers have ever personally experienced any desert regions, they'll feel that immediacy in the pages of The Immeasurable World.
We live on a crowded planet. The once unexplored corners of the world are all mapped and measured. To travel nowadays is to see what others have seen, to step where others have stepped ... For some, this is a blessing. In an age of GPS and smartphones, we need never get lost. Swipe and we know where we are. Click and up comes the nearest burger joint. Yet for the intrepid travel writer, this is a problem. Where on earth to go? ... In this rich and refreshing travelogue, William Atkins finds an answer: the desert ... Atkins’ ability to eke out close to 400 pages on the subject is testament both to his skill as a writer — sharp, sympathetic, endlessly informative — and the surprising abundance of his chosen topic. The desert is neither mausoleum nor museum, but rather a complex, living ecosystem.
At the outset of The Immeasurable World William Atkins explains how his first trip to the Empty Quarter of Arabia was occasioned by the end of a love affair. 'The woman I’d lived with for four years had taken a job overseas,' he writes. 'I would not be going with her.' ... 'The summer before, in the name of research, I’d spent a week with a community of Cistercian monks.' His flight to the deserts of this book is thus framed not as discovery but recovery; his impulse is an ascetic one, rather than voyeuristic or sybaritic. Atkins is not in thrall to deserts – in his words 'dead', 'forsaken' places – but loves them for their austerity, and the clarity of thought they grant. From Oman to Australia, from China to Arizona, deserts offer him allegories of humanity’s mistreatment of the planet, and of one another ... He picks his way across the stones towards the water.
Blending history, ecology, current events and personal encounters, The Immeasurable World courts comparisons with the capaciously learned nature writing of John McPhee. But there’s also an open-ended spiritual quest to Mr. Atkins’s sojourns, which follow closely in the footsteps of religious and literary forerunners who were lured by the rewards of extreme renunciation ... Peace of mind, isolation, a heightened attentiveness spurred by the proximity to death—these are conditions for clear, beautiful writing, and Mr. Atkins frequently meets the high standards of his precursors ... Yet an uneasy subtext of The Immeasurable World is that true solitude is growing harder to come by. The book is surprisingly populated. Mr. Atkins is almost constantly attended by guides or helpful locals ... What I sometimes missed in The Immeasurable World was an interest in the desert for its own sake rather than as a place useful to people when they’ve wanted to escape civilization, win fame in exploration, test nuclear weapons, or consume psychedelics and light a giant effigy on fire.
Atmospheric, geological and geographical features that contribute to desert formation are well handled here, as are modern political issues, such as nuclear testing in southern Australia in the 1950s ... The Gobi section is gripping, too ... He correctly identifies desert duality: deathly and forsaken, yet 'the site of revelation, of contemplation and sanctuary.' He handles the metaphorical aspect of his subject with a light touch ... The Immeasurable World is delightfully variegated. Within a page, Atkins switches from environmental jeremiad to an account of the famous Burning Man festival in Nevada, an event you will never visit after reading this book ... In the end, one wonders what connects the disparate narratives in these chapters, bar vague reflections on the haiku of the desert—biological and social. But it’s an entertaining volume.
William Atkins has done extensive and presumably rather expensive research for The Immeasurable World ... Atkins is very strong on the history, and provides a useful bibliography for each desert featuring 19th-century explorers who wrote about it in English ... There seem to be no useful generalizations. Taken together, Atkins’s essays present desert environments on four continents with a great deal in common but each distinct ... Regrettably, rather than straight reportage, Atkins’s style can be choppy. He cuts from one of these treatments to another in the middle of a story and then returns later to take up the narrative ... However, while the cartography is good, the cartographer apparently wasn’t given access to the text. The maps show all sorts of curious features but omit most of the places Atkins mentions ... That said, this is a very recommendable book. Atkins makes some perceptive comments about deserts you’re unlikely to read about anywhere else.
In The Immeasurable World, his perceptive and witty account of his desert travels, Atkins gives the reader an entertaining tour of the tent city’s zones and attractions ... He also zeroes in on certain little-known properties of the extravaganza — its whiteness, for example ... This is weighty material, but Atkins is usually prepared to buoy it up with a joke.
After a breakup with his girlfriend of four years and a week spent with Cistercian monks in southwest England, Atkins became obsessed with deserts ... And so began an odyssey that took Atkins to eight deserts across the globe: the Empty Quarter in Oman, the Gobi and Taklamakan in China, Australia’s Great Victoria, the Aral Sea area in Kazakhstan, the Black Rock and Sonoran in the U.S., and Egypt’s Eastern Desert ... Atkins infuses his travel writing with poetic prose...thoughtful book is a wonderfully satisfying travelogues.
A wide-ranging travelogue, covering eight deserts, interspersed with historical accounts of desert geography and travel ... Making up one-sixth of our planet’s land, deserts have fascinated writers since the dawn of Christianity, a group that includes Atkins ... A lucid observer, the author chronicles his travels through the world’s most arid lands, ruminating on their history, natural history, ongoing conditions, and mostly discouraging future. Viewing the world through British eyes, he makes a beeline for the first of his eight deserts.
