Vince Beiser
Vince Beiser is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles. His first book, "The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization" was a finalist for a PEN/E.O. Wilson Award and a California Book Award. “Stunning,” says NPR; “impassioned and alarming,” says the Washington Post.Vince has reported from over 100 countries, states, provinces, emirates, kingdoms, occupied territories, liberated areas, no man’s lands and disaster zones. He has exposed conditions in California’s harshest prisons, trained with troops bound for Iraq, ridden with the first responders to disasters in Haiti and Nepal and hunted down other stories from around the world for publications including Wired, The Atlantic, Harper’s,The Guardian, Mother Jones, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.Vince has also been a correspondent for the Emmy-winning news show SoCal Connected. Vince’s work has been honored by Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Columbia, Medill and Missouri Graduate Schools of Journalism, the National Mental Health Association, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and many other institutions. He has twice been part of a team that won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the magazine industry’s highest honor. He is also a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization
Vince Beiser
The gripping 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--even more than oil. Every concrete building and paved road on Earth, every 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 the compelling true story of the hugely important and diminishing natural resource that grows more essential every day, and of the people who mine it, sell it, build with 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, which has received little public attention. Not all sand is created equal: Some of the easiest sand to get to is the least useful. Award-winning journalist Vince Beiser delves deep into this world, taking readers on a journey across the globe, from the United States to remote corners of India, China, and Dubai to explain why sand is so crucial to modern life. Along the way, readers encounter world-changing innovators, island-building entrepreneurs, desert fighters, and murderous sand pirates. The result is an entertaining and eye-opening work, one that is both unexpected and involving, rippling with fascinating detail and filled with surprising characters.
Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future
Vince Beiser
How the metals we need to power technology and energy are spawning environmental havoc, political upheaval, and murder—and how we can do better.An Australian multimillionaire’s plan to mine the ocean floor.Garbage pickers in Nigeria risking their lives to salvage e-waste amid nightmarish pollution.A Bill Gates-backed entrepreneur harnessing artificial intelligence to find metals in the Arctic.Train-robbing copper thieves in Chile. These are some of the people in the intensifying global competition to locate and extract the minerals essential for two critical technologies that will shape humanity’s the internet and renewable energy. It’s a race that will create new industries, generate enormous wealth, and destabilize the global balance of power. It could propel us to a more sustainable future —or plunge us into an environmental nightmare. In Power Metal, journalist and author Vince Beiser explores the Achilles’ heel of green power and digital that the manufacturing of our computers, cell phones, electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines requires enormous amounts of increasingly rare materials—lithium, cobalt, copper, and others—the demand for which is skyrocketing. Around the world, businesses and governments are scrambling for new places and new ways to get those metals, at enormous cost to people and the planet. Beiser crisscrossed the world to witness this race, reporting on the damage it is already inflicting, the ways it could get worse, and the ways in which we can minimize that damage. The result is a book that is both a gripping read and a sobering account of the battle between what civilization demands and what the planet can withstand. Power Metal is a compelling and important glimpse into this new, disturbing, and exciting world.
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