‘Sacred Earth: Places of Peace and Power’ bound for glory

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 www.sacredsites.com to share his work, and now he’s given us this 276-page coffee-table tome.

Many of the hundreds of color images in it 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. (I could have used more information about exactly how and when he made some of these striking pictures, but there’s none of that.) Ah, well. It should be enough to see these places, to learn a little about them, to be reminded how they have inspired humans to all sorts of actions, including raising the megalithic stones of Stenness, Scotland, and sculpting the boulders at Kalasasaya Temple in Tiwanacu, Bolivia.

The book, $35, is from Sterling Publishing, www.sterlingpublishing.com.