While trying to memorize the Ten Commandments for school, twelve-year-old twins Josie and Jamie and their younger brother Peter investigate strange lights that have appeared near their southern California desert home.

Naturalist Craig Childs's "utterly memorable and fantastic" study of the desert's dangerous beauty is based on years of adventures in the deserts of the American West (Washington Post). Like the highest mountain peaks, deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to the most seasoned explorers. Craig Childs, who has spent years in the deserts of the American West as an adventurer, a river guide, and a field instructor in natural history, has developed a keen appreciation for these forbidding landscapes: their beauty, their wonder, and especially their paradoxes. His extraordinary treks through arid lands in search of water are an astonishing revelation of the natural world at its most extreme. "Utterly memorable and fantastic...Certainly no reader will ever see the desert in the same way again." —Suzannah Lessard, Washington Post

Biblical archeologist Dr. Jacob Cooper arrives in Togwana with his children Jay and Lila and one goal-to discover the secret behind the two-mile-high Stone that has mysteriously appeared overnight. Who could have excavated, carved, and transported the colossal Stone? The Coopers' uneasiness soon turns into dread as they are watched and threatened by the country's new government and brutal dictator Id Nkromo. Follow the Coopers as they race to solve the mystery of the desert stone!

The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.

When a Chinese monk broke into a hidden cave in 1900, he uncovered one of the world’s great literary secrets: a time capsule from the ancient Silk Road. Inside, scrolls were piled from floor to ceiling, undisturbed for a thousand years. The gem within was the Diamond Sutra of AD 868. This key Buddhist teaching, made 500 years before Gutenberg inked his press, is the world’s oldest printed book. The Silk Road once linked China with the Mediterranean. It conveyed merchants, pilgrims and ideas. But its cultures and oases were swallowed by shifting sands. Central to the Silk Road’s rediscovery was a man named Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-born scholar and archaeologist employed by the British service. Undaunted by the vast Gobi Desert, Stein crossed thousands of desolate miles with his fox terrier Dash. Stein met the Chinese monk and secured the Diamond Sutra and much more. The scroll’s journey—by camel through arid desert, by boat to London’s curious scholars, by train to evade the bombs of World War II—merges an explorer’s adventures, political intrigue, and continued controversy. The Diamond Sutra has inspired Jack Kerouac and the Dalai Lama. Its journey has coincided with the growing appeal of Buddhism in the West. As the Gutenberg Age cedes to the Google Age, the survival of the Silk Road’s greatest treasure is testament to the endurance of the written word.

Greed and intrigue combine explosively in this gripping, masterly account of a key moment in the history of the Middle East, and a portrait of T.E. Lawrence--Lawrence of Arabia himself--that is bright, nuanced, and full of fresh insights into the true nature of the master mythmaker. Photos. Maps.

The Secret of the Desert by Coutts Brisbane is a stunning accumulation of mysteries: a ship with no known origin, a naturalist shot dead during a butterfly hunt, and much, much more. Excerpt: "SAIL lib, port bow, suh!" the lookout in the fore-crosstrees hailed the schooner's deck. "Two stick boat lib, suh!" Captain Girvan, R.N.R., hoisted his long body from the depths of his deck-chair, stared ahead over the shimmering wake of the sun setting across the placid waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria, then swung himself into the main rigging."

Full-color photographs of the landscape and people of the Arabian desert, with selections of Arabic poetry.