Bunker
Building for the End Times
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
As seen on 60 Minutes, a thought-provoking, chilling, and eerily prescient look at “prepper” communities around the world that are building bunkers against a possible apocalypse.
Currently, 3.7 million Americans call themselves preppers. Millions more prep without knowing it. Bradley Garrett, who began writing this book years before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, argues that prepping is a rational response to global, social, and political systems that are failing to produce credible narratives of continued stability. Left with a sense of foreboding fueled by disease outbreaks, increasing government dysfunctionality, eroding critical infrastructure, nuclear brinksmanship, and an accelerating climate crisis, people all over the world are responding predictably—by hunkering down.
Garrett traveled across four continents to meet those who are constructing panic rooms, building underground backyard survival chambers, stockpiling supplies, preparing go bags, hiding inflatable rafts, rigging mobile “bugout” vehicles, and burrowing deep into the earth. He has returned with “a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege, and apocalypse” (Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland) from the frontlines of the way we live now: an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings our times into new and sharper focus.
With scenes that are “fascinating, amusing, crazy, chilling, and surreally topical” (Douglas Preston, author of Lost City of the Monkey God), Garrett shows that the bunker is all around us: in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he reveals, it’s in our minds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cultural geographer Garrett (coauthor, Global Undergrounds) delivers an engrossing tour of the fortified living spaces where "preppers" plan to isolate and protect themselves from the collapse of civilization. Using prepping "as a lens through which to perceive and understand contemporary conditions of social life," Garrett profiles developer and "dread merchant" Robert Vicino, who charges $25,000 for a bunker in his 10,000-family complex in South Dakota; sketches the history of the survivalist religious group Church Universal and Triumphant; and visits the Tasmanian "wilderness redoubt" an American lawyer built in the 1970s after reading the nuclear fallout novel On the Beach. The Church of Latter-day Saints recommends "practical prepping" to its members, some of whom store years' worth of food in their basements, and the Mormon founders of Plan B Supply, which builds "custom assault vehicles and bug-out rigs," have led their customers on missions to rescue flood victims. Garrett notes the project delays and scam allegations that have plagued bunker communities, and suggests that some developers seem to be capitalizing on "violent media narratives" of the Trump era. Yet he makes a convincing case that preppers offer hope for humankind's ability to "engineer our survival." This richly detailed account will have readers wondering about their own disaster plans.
