Book Review: The World in a Grain

The World in a Grain: The story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization
Vince Beiser
Engineering, ecology

Hooray! I thought. Another biography-of-a-substance book! And one that promises to amply fulfill the implied contract of all such books, viz., to take a thing that nobody thinks about and make us think about it.

Chapter 1, the introduction, met all my expectations. Did you know there's a sand mafia--which sounds funny, except that they kill people? That the Arab states import sand, because desert sand isn't suitable for making concrete (it's too rounded)? That China alone used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century? That there's an impending sand shortage?

With all that, I figured chapter 2 would dive into the basic facts. I was hoping to find out something about the geology of sand, the geography of sand, the chemistry of sand, how sand moves, maybe a little history.

These things are not in chapter 2. They're not anywere in the book, except in small incidental doses. That's because The World in a Grain isn't really about sand. It's about advocacy journalism. Vince Beiser is a Prophet rather than a Wizard. He wants to sound the trumpet, rally the troops, sing a few choruses of "We Shall Overcome," and basically change the world. Sand--specifically concrete--is something we're addicted to, he says, and it's bad for us. Repent, ye sinners!

Oh, he does his best to be objective. He interviews people who are in favor of commercial fracking-sand mining as well as those who are opposed. He scrupulously describes positives of things like roads as well as negatives. But his heart clearly isn't in it. A few examples:

• "When pressed, though, [anti-desertification entrepreneur Wang Wenbiao] acknowledges that about half of the company's $6 billion in annual revenues come from "traditional" industries, including chemical production and coal power plants." This dig--I could cite many similar examples--contributes nothing to understanding the topic of the chapter (which is "can China stop deserts by planting trees?"). Its only purpose is to imply, without saying it, that Wang Wenbiao is morally compromised.
• "The bigger question is, can the planet handle the whole way of life that Dubai both represents and embodies--the air-conditioned, car-dependent, energy-dependent, resource-intensive 'good life'?" Gosh, thanks for pointing that out, complete with scare quotes. I would never have thought of it myself.
• "In an ideal world, [fracking-derived oil and gas] could be replaced with solar and wind power." Yes, and in an ideal world magic sparkly pink unicorns would cure cancer and poop ice cream. This is not that world, nor is it likely to become so.
• "At the same time that freeways have brought these benefits, though, they have also hollowed out cities, killed off countless small towns, wreaked environmental havoc, and spawned a car-dependent culture based on sprawling suburbs and soulless shopping malls." Agree a thousand percent. Go write a book about it, Vince--a different book. In this book, passages like this read like mere venting.

This kind of thing is always frustrating. Advocacy journalism is fine in and of itself, but if that's the book you want to write, you should just write it. The World in a Grain veers between empiricism and passion, to the detriment of both. A truly descriptive book on sand would have to, e.g., include at least a few words on the Sahara Desert; Beiser just ignores it. A better advocacy book would use the factual information as a way of drawing the reader to a conclusion, instead of lapsing into oratory in the last third of every chapter. The World in a Grain has a lot of interesting pieces, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.