'Bunker is an extraordinary achievement; a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege and apocalypse told through the space of the bunker. Garrett has written a gripping, grim, witty work of geography and ethnography, which he completed - with eerie timeliness - in the first weeks of the COVID pandemic. A book about prepping and prognostication, then, which had already foretold its own future' Robert MacFarlane
Today, the bunker has become the extreme expression of our greatest fears: from pandemics to climate change and nuclear war. And once you look, it doesn't take long to start seeing bunkers everywhere.
In Bunker, acclaimed urban explorer and cultural geographer Bradley Garrett explores the global and rapidly growing movement of 'prepping' for social and environmental collapse, or 'Doomsday'. From the 'dread merchants' hustling safe spaces in the American mid-West to eco-fortresses in Thailand, from geoscrapers to armoured mobile bunkers, Bunker is a brilliant, original and never less than deeply disturbing story from the frontlines of the way we live now: an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings it into new, sharp focus.
The bunker, Garrett shows, is all around us: in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he shows, it's in our minds.
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Imprint: Allen Lane
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Published: 04/08/2020
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ISBN: 9780241336014
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Length: 352 Pages
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RRP: £20.00
Reviews
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Bunker is an extraordinary achievement; a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege and apocalypse told through the space of the bunker. Garrett has written a gripping, grim, witty work of geography and ethnography, which he completed - with eerie timeliness - in the first weeks of the COVID pandemic. A book about prepping and prognostication, then, which had already foretold its own future.
Robert MacFarlane
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Garrett's research has involved hanging out with millenarian fruitcakes, disaster profiteers and the uber-rich, not to mention tooled-up, swivel-eyed anarcho-libertarians from America to Australia ... His sense is that disaster gives us an opportunity to rethink how we live. What will we learn?
Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian
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This baseball-cap wearing academic is the world's leading expert on survivalists - those who have gone to extreme lengths to prepare for doomsday-style social and environmental collapse. He has spent the past three years researching the "preppers" who have been stockpiling food and weapons in desert bunkers and eco-fortresses. But he never expected [Bunker] to be so topical.
Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, The Times
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Garrett spent several years travelling the world, going down into bunkers and talking to their owners and tenants. His book is an incredible record of that journey, and also functions as a philosophical or psychological disquisition about space, about freedom, about survival. Bunker is an incredible read and will surely sell in quite enormous numbers, assuming the human race remains intact and can still read.
Steve Braunias, New Zealand Herald
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For Garrett, physical exploration is merely the outward manifestation of a deeper philosophical inquiry. The theoretical DNA of much of his work traces back to the concept of "psychogeography"
Matthew Power, GQ
About the Author
