Vince Beiser's "The World in a Grain"

Vince Beiser is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Wired, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, he lives in Los Angeles.

Beiser applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization, and reported the following:

Page 99 reads in its entirety as follows:

Part II: How Sand is Building the Twenty-First Century’s Globalized, Digital World

“And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand.” Matthew 7:26

That’s a pretty good summary of the book’s message. It's story of the most important overlooked commodity in the world--sand--and the crucial role it plays in our lives.

After water and air, sand is the natural resource that we consume more than any other--more than oil, more than wheat. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every window, computer screen and silicon chip, is made from sand. From Egypt's pyramids to the Hubble telescope, from the world's tallest skyscraper to the sidewalk below it, from Chartres' stained-glass windows to your iPhone, sand shelters us, empowers us, engages us, and inspires us. It's the ingredient that makes possible our cities, our science, our lives--and our future.

And incredibly, we're running out of it.

The World in a Grain is, I hope, the compelling true story of this hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more important every day, and of the people who extract it, use it, sell it—and sometimes, even kill for it. It's also a provocative examination of the serious human and environmental costs incurred by our dependence on sand.

Visit Vince Beiser's website.

--Marshal Zeringue