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Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies
by Alastair Bonnett
At a time when Google Maps Street View can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite's remotest trails and cell phones double as navigational systems, it's hard to imagine there's any uncharted ground left on the planet. In Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination.
Bonnett's remarkable tour includes moving villages, secret cities, no man's lands, and floating islands. He explores places as disorienting as Sandy Island, an island included on maps until just two years ago despite the fact that it never existed. Or 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. Or 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.
An intrepid guide down the road much-less traveled, Bonnett reveals that the most extraordinary places on earth might be hidden in plain sight, just around the corner from your apartment or underfoot on a wooded path. Perfect for urban explorers, wilderness ramblers, and armchair travelers struck by wanderlust, Unruly Places will change the way you see the places you inhabit.
"Starred Review. A scintillating poke to our geographical imaginations." - Kirkus
"Bonnett's charming, pensive prose and light-handed erudition illuminates the stubborn human impulse to find a home in the unlikeliest places." - Publishers Weekly
"This book will satisfy armchair travelers as well as those who appreciate thought-provoking journeys." - Booklist
"A fascinating delve into uncharted, forgotten, and lost places...not just a trivia-tastic anthology of remote destinations but a nifty piece of psychogeography, explaining our human need for these cartographical conundrums." - Wanderlust
"Fizzingly entertaining and enlightening." - The Telegraph (UK)
"Carefully avoiding nostalgia and rose-tinted topophilia, Bonnett manages to reveal a myriad of ways in which place and geography still matter." - Tim Cresswell, author of Place, An Introduction and professor of history and international affairs, Northeastern University
"Through dozens of punchy tales, Bonnett takes us on an imaginative grand tour of the most exceptional places in the world, reminding us that even in an age of seemingly total surveillance, the world is teeming with geographic mysteries." - Bradley Garrett, author of Explore Everything
This information about Unruly Places was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alastair Bonnett is Professor of Social Geography at Newcastle University. The author of numerous academic texts, he served as editor of the avant-garde, psycho-geographical magazine Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration.
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