New book explores Earth’s sacred sites

Martin Gray, the photographer and anthropologist behind “Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power,” has spent more than 20 years shooting hundreds of sacred sites around the world; he created SacredSites.com to share his work; and now he’s given us this 276-page coffee-table tome.

Many of the hundreds of its color images are arresting and inspiring, although not every reader will be ready to swallow all the high-flown, semi-scientific prose about how these places differ from the rest of workaday Earth. Instead, I could have used more information about how and when he made some of these striking pictures, but there’s none of that. Ah well. It should be enough, I suppose, to see these places and to learn a little about them. The cover shot, which shows a seaside volcano under slanting sunbeams, was shot at Maui’s Haleakala crater. Info: $35; Sterling Publishing, www.sterlingpublishing.com.