Author @ the Library: "Desert Air," with George Steinmetz, celebrated exploration photographer and a regular contributor to National Geographic and GEO Magazines.

This illustrated presentation explores the world's “extreme deserts,” which receive less than four inches of precipitation per year. The author has spent 15 years on his epic body of work, the first comprehensive photographic collection of the world's deserts, capturing surreally beautiful visions of deserts, from China’s great Gobi Desert to the Sahara in northern Africa to Death Valley in California. Much more than a visual journey, these images are enriched by the exciting stories behind his adventures in some of the world’s most difficult and challenging areas—from smuggling his paraglider into Libya to getting arrested for spying in Iran, to crashing into a tree in western China. He reveals extraordinary desert ecosystems that together form a kind of disparate family of co-evolved landscapes; similar, yet each unique in its own way.