Aidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.

Our everyday conversations reveal the widespread assumption that positive and negative treatment of others can be justified on the grounds that 'they deserve it'. But what is it exactly to deserve something? In this book, Kevin Kinghorn explores how we came to have this concept and offers an explanation of why people feel so strongly that redress is needed when outcomes are undeserved. Kinghorn probes for that core concern which is common to the range of everyday desert claims people make, ultimately proposing an alternative model of desert which represents a fundamental challenge to the received wisdom on the structure of desert claims. In the end, he argues, our plea for deserved treatment ends up being linked to the universal human concern for a shared narrative, as we seek healthy relationships within a community.

Michael Scott Moore, a journalist and the author of Sweetness and Blood, incorporates personal narrative and rigorous investigative journalism in this profound and revelatory memoir of his three-year captivity by Somali pirates—a riveting,thoughtful, and emotionally resonant exploration of foreign policy, religious extremism, and the costs of survival. In January 2012, having covered a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg for Spiegel Online International—and funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting—Michael Scott Moore traveled to the Horn of Africa to write about piracy and ways to end it. In a terrible twist of fate, Moore himself was kidnapped and subsequently held captive by Somali pirates. Subjected to conditions that break even the strongest spirits—physical injury, starvation, isolation, terror—Moore’s survival is a testament to his indomitable strength of mind. In September 2014, after 977 days, he walked free when his ransom was put together by the help of several US and German institutions, friends, colleagues, and his strong-willed mother. Yet Moore’s own struggle is only part of the story: The Desert and the Sea falls at the intersection of reportage, memoir, and history. Caught between Muslim pirates, the looming threat of Al-Shabaab, and the rise of ISIS, Moore observes the worlds that surrounded him—the economics and history of piracy; the effects of post-colonialism; the politics of hostage negotiation and ransom; while also conjuring the various faces of Islam—and places his ordeal in the context of the larger political and historical issues. A sort of Catch-22 meets Black Hawk Down, The Desert and the Sea is written with dark humor, candor, and a journalist’s clinical distance and eye for detail. Moore offers an intimate and otherwise inaccessible view of life as we cannot fathom it, brilliantly weaving his own experience as a hostage with the social, economic, religious, and political factors creating it. The Desert and the Sea is wildly compelling and a book that will take its place next to titles like Den of Lions and Even Silence Has an End.

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.

The Geometry of Desert explores the hidden complexity of moral desert. Using graphs to illustrate and contrast alternative views, it carefully investigates the various ways in which the value of an outcome varies when people get (or fail to get) what they deserve.

People consider desert part of our moral world. It structures how we think about important areas such as love, punishment, and work. This book argues that no one deserves anything. If this is correct, then claims that people deserve general and specific things are false. At the heart of desert is the notion of moral credit or discredit. People deserve good things (credit) when they are good people or do desirable things. These desirable things might be right, good, or virtuous acts. People deserve bad things (discredit) when they are bad people or do undesirable things. On some theories, people deserve credit in general terms. For instance, they deserve a good life. On other theories, people deserve credit in specific terms. For instance, they deserve specific incomes, jobs, punishments, relationships, or reputations. The author’s argument against desert rests on three claims: There is no adequate theory of what desert is. Even if there were an adequate theory of what desert is, nothing grounds (justifies) desert. Even if there were an adequate theory of what desert is and something were to ground it, there is no plausible account of what people deserve. Desert Collapses will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in ethics and political philosophy.