In
White Sands,
Geoff Dyer (“one of the funniest writers alive” —
Chicago Tribune
) finds himself on the road again, crisscrossing the globe from French Polynesia to northernmost Norway. Throughout his adventures—with a tour guide who may
not
be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his “greatest experience from the outside world”; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles—Dyer interweaves fiction and nonfiction to craft an often hilarious, always inquisitive travelogue about the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.