In White Sands, Geoff Dyer ( one of the funniest writers alive -Chicago Tribune) finds himself on the road again, crisscrossing the globe from French Polynesia to northernmost Norway. Throughout his adventures-with a tour guide who may not be a tour guide in the Forbidden City in Beijing; with friends in New Mexico, where D. H. Lawrence famously claimed to have had his greatest experience from the outside world ; with Don Cherry (or a photo of him, at any rate) at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles-Dyer interweaves fiction and nonfiction to craft an often hilarious, always inquisitive travelogue about the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.