Helen and Bill Thayer, a two person husband and wife team, became the first man and woman to walk the entire length of almost 1,500 miles, west to east, of the Mongolian Gobi Desert.

Imperial, communist or autocratic, Russia has always been a towering and intimidating neighbor. What would it be like to traverse the entirety of the Russian periphery to examine its effects on those closest to her? An astute and brilliant combination of lyric travel writing and modern history, The Border is a book about Russia without its author ever entering Russia itself. Fatland gets to the heart of what it has meant to be the neighbor of that...