For millennia, Chile's Norte Grande desert had been mined for silver, iron, and copper, but it was the 19th-century discovery of nitrate that transformed the country into a modern state and forced the desert's colonization. In this richly layered memoir—illustrated with the author's own photographs—Ariel Dorfman sets out for the world's driest desert, a place that gave birth to the first Chilean democratic and socialist movements while nurturing the likes of Salvador Allende to Augusto Pinochet. Along the way, he also looks for traces of his friend, Freddy Taberna, a 1960s activist executed by a firing squad in a remote death camp.