Unruly Places
Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This “guide to weird, ruined, and wonderful spots” across the globe explores disappearing islands, forbidden deserts, and much more—a “terrific book” (Los Angeles Times).
At a time when Google Maps Street View can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite’s remotest trails, it’s hard to imagine there’s any uncharted ground left on the planet. But in Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett rekindles our geographical imaginations with excursions into some of the world’s most peculiar places—such as moving villages, secret cities, no man’s lands, and floating islands.
Bonnett investigates Sandy Island, a place that appeared on maps until just two years ago despite the fact that it never existed; Sealand, an abandoned gun platform off the English coast that a British citizen claimed as his own sovereign nation, issuing passports and crowning his wife as a princess; Baarle, a patchwork of Dutch and Flemish enclaves where walking from the grocery store’s produce section to the meat counter can involve crossing national borders; and many other curious locales. In this “delightfully quirky” guide down the road much less traveled, Bonnett reveals that the most extraordinary places on earth might be hidden in plain sight (Ron Charles, Washington Post).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In short, four-to-five page essays, social geographer Bonnett explores forbidding cities like the pirate stronghold of Hobyo, Somalia, the abandoned town of Pripyat, hard by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and the underground towns of Turkish Cappadocia; dejected dwellings, like the RV camp at LAX's Parking Lot E and the secret "Bright Light" CIA detention center in Bucharest; fake places, like the empty British towns built to distract German bombers from real ones and the completely imaginary Sandy Island, which appeared on maps of the Pacific for a century until it was discovered not to exist; a homey fox den and an inaccessible traffic island near the author's English home. Bonnett digs up interesting lore on these 47 offbeat sites that, together, "conspire to make the world seem a stranger place where discovery and adventure are still possible, both nearby and far away.",. Bonnett's charming, pensive prose and light-handed erudition illuminates the stubborn human impulse to find a home in the unlikeliest places.
