Bunker

Bunker

Building for the End Times

Summary

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Since prehistory, bunkers have been built as protection from cataclysmic social and environmental forces, and as places of power and transformation. 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.

© Bradley Garrett 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Reviews

  • How prescient and timely ... This is a tartly thoughtful work, by turns witty and philosophical, with an undercurrent of anger at the way we are governed and the commodification of existential fear. He writes pacily, bringing to vivid life a gallery of survivalist wingnuts, conmen and evangelists.
    Nick Curtis, Evening Standard

About the author

Bradley Garrett

Dr. Bradley Garrett is an American social and cultural geographer. He is the author of five books translated into four languages, over fifty journal articles and book chapters, and has written for The Atlantic, the Guardian, and GQ. His research has been featured on media outlets worldwide including the The Joe Rogan Experience, the BBC, and National Geographic. Dr. Garrett received his PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, was a postdoctoral fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and served as a research fellow at the University of Sydney. He has been an invited speaker at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House (Australia), Chicago Ideas Week and Google Zeitgeist (USA), and at the Tate Modern and Barbican galleries (UK), amongst other places. He currently resides in Big Bear Lake, California.
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