Lands of extremes, contrasts, metaphor and myth, deserts cover nearly a third of our planet’s land area and are home to more than half a billion people. The desert as an idea has long captured the Western imagination, but too often in ways that fail to grasp the true scope and diversity of these spaces and the realities of the lives of people for whom arid lands are home. For the outsider, stories of the desert are about the exotic, about adventures into hostile territory. Few of us consider the perspectives of those who make their livelihoods in  the desert each day. This book attempts to bridge the gaps, both scientific and cultural, between perception and reality, while celebrating the fascination, excitement and diversity of arid lands and their inhabitants. Though generally seen as arid and infertile, deserts have been the birthplaces of critical evolutionary adaptations, civilizations, ideologies and agricultural and social progress. Deserts play active roles in the continued evolution of our climate and societies, demanding that we think seriously about these barren lands and their future. Does the botanical and microbial diversity of arid lands provide keys to food supply, new pharmaceuticals and our planet’s carbon budget? Would the city of Phoenix not exist if the advice of John Wesley Powell had been heeded? What can we learn from the writing of a female cross-dressing drug addict who drowned in the Sahara? And who was Hi Jolly and what were “little fellah bums”? From the Gobi to the Sonora, via the Sahel and the Australian outback, The Desert: Lands of Lost Borders relates the tales, truths, folklore and facts of arid lands in an analysis that is at once informative and surprising – and, during the United Nations Decade for Deserts and the Fight Against Desertification, extremely timely.