Unruly Places

April 14, 2014
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.

Starred review from June 1, 2014
A wonderful collection of a few dozen geographical enchantments, places that defy expectations and may disturb and disorient yet rekindle the romanticism of exploration and the meaning of place."We are headed for uncharted territory, to places found on few maps and sometimes on none. They are both extraordinary and real. This is a book of floating islands, dead cities, and hidden kingdoms," writes Bonnett (Social Geography/Newcastle Univ.; Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia, 2010, etc.). The book is a whole lot more: a passionate defense of place and a swing at the "generic blandscapes" that have come to occupy much of the landscape, eating away at our sense of self, especially as a place-making species with an appreciation that our presence helps give the world its local color-that we create place as much as we inhabit it. Bonnett does not bring a zealot's nuttiness to the cause, but his ability to get under the skin of a place-places that are often fierce, dark, demanding and strange-brings geography back into focus as integral to human identity. They are, by and large, outre: decoy villages set aflame to confuse nighttime aircraft bombers; trash islands; exclaves and breakaways; pirate towns; free territories established by runaway slaves; Potemkin villages and forbidden places (black sites). The author chronicles his exploration of St. Petersburg to witness the politics of place names and Mecca to experience Jane Jacobs' worst nightmare. There are "urban exploration as a kind of geographical version of surrealist automatic writing" and landscapes "the British police designate as public sex environments." And there are the disappeared: ancient sultanates, a blue-asbestos mining town, a closed city once dedicated to making nuclear weapons. Bonnett brings us to each place from an angle of surprise and wonder.A scintillating poke to our geographical imaginations.

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May 15, 2014

In an era when "global communities" are often formed in cyberspace and personal possessions are frequently irrelevant, Bonnett's (What Is Geography?) latest work poses the question as to whether the pursuit of "topophilia" ("a special love for peculiar places") is an archaic activity. He provides the answer by showing in 47 entries that there is a constant human need for escape, freedom, and creativity. A residential ship that sails the seven seas, remotely located festivals, micronations, and a male-only religious community may be unusual, but they all address this need. The author's fascinating descriptions of lost spaces, enclaves and breakaway nations, floating islands and ephemeral places, hidden geographies, no man's lands, dead cities, and spaces of exception complement Italo Calvino's fabricated tales of 55 places in Invisible Cities and serve to prove that "fact is stranger than fiction." The author tackles psychogeography by exploring places that may soon look very different, if they continue to exist at all, and by navigating a place using the map of another location to intentionally disorient himself, transmitting a vital energy that disrupts our expectations and reshapes our imagination. VERDICT This book will satisfy armchair travelers as well as those who appreciate thought-provoking journeys.--Victor Or, Surrey Libs., BC

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2014
Bonnett divides places into helpful categories. Hidden Geographies includes tunnel labyrinths below old cities and oddities like an established community within a Philippine cemetery. We visit Dead Cities like the skyscrapered, yet bizarrely empty, attempts by China and North Korea to proclaim ideological success. Unused spaces enclosed by highways fall within No Man's Lands. Lost Spaces range from tiny islands that come and go, with shifting conditions, to Leningrad, Russia, which was renamed St. Petersburg. International airspace, a peninsula-consuming Greek monastery, and a Somalian pirate feral city fall under Spaces of Exception. A section on breakaway nations includes a chunk of India within an Indian enclave in Bangladesh. Floating Islands come made of pumice, trash, ice, and modern building materials. The strongest places concern human adaptation. These Ephemeral Places contain a parking lot where work-desperate airport employees, including many pilots, lay over in RVs. The erudite Bonnett explores the roots of place all the way to childhood hideaways, yet the book doesn't build. The many locations remain detached.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)