"In this tour de force of inquiry and thought, Fox leads us through the roughly one-quarter million acres - spanning much of Utah and most of Nevada - that comprise the Great Basin, the highest and driest of the American deserts. Explorers and carto-graphers found it imponderable; pioneers and settlers found it uninhabitable. Even today the Great Basin remains a largely unknown and forbidding landscape, one that continues to exercise a powerful influence on human desire and imagination.".

"In "The Void," Fox walks us through this landscape, investigating our responses to the Great Basin's appearance - a pattern of mountains and valleys on a scale so large, so empty and undifferentiated by shape, form, and color, that the visual and cognitive expectations of the human mind are confounded and impaired." ""The Grid," focuses on the evolution of cartography in the nineteenth century and the explorations of John Charles Fremont in his search for the legendary Buenaventura River.".

""The Sign" considers the language and the metaphors we continue to place around and over the void, revealing the Great Basin as a vast palimpsest where the neonlined boulevards of Las Vegas overlay and interplay with millennia-old petroglyphs and pictographs." "The Void, the Grid, & the Sign traverses the knowns and the unknowns of the Great Basin and gives us insight into the fanciful and fearsome projections ascribed to its vast spaces."--BOOK JACKET.