Underground construction -- History. |
Waste disposal in the ground -- History. |
Mines and mineral resources -- History |
Burial -- History. |
Building, Underground |
Subsurface construction |
Subterranean construction |
Underground structures |
Subsurface waste disposal |
Underground waste disposal |
Burial customs |
Burying-grounds |
Graves |
Interment |
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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
"[A] winningly obsessive history of our relationship with underground places" ( The Guardian ), from sacred caves and derelict subway stations to nuclear bunkers and ancient underground cities--an exploration of the history, science, architecture, and mythology of the worlds beneath our feet
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR
When Will Hunt was sixteen years old, he discovered an abandoned tunnel that ran beneath his house in Providence, Rhode Island. His first tunnel trips inspired a lifelong fascination with exploring underground worlds, from the derelict subway stations and sewers of New York City to sacred caves, catacombs, tombs, bunkers, and ancient underground cities in more than twenty countries around the world. Underground is both a personal exploration of Hunt's obsession and a panoramic study of how we are all connected to the underground, how caves and other dark hollows have frightened and enchanted us through the ages.
In a narrative spanning continents and epochs, Hunt follows a cast of subterraneaphiles who have dedicated themselves to investigating underground worlds. He tracks the origins of life with a team of NASA microbiologists a mile beneath the Black Hills, camps out for three days with urban explorers in the catacombs and sewers of Paris, descends with an Aboriginal family into a 35,000-year-old mine in the Australian outback, and glimpses a sacred sculpture molded by Paleolithic artists in the depths of a cave in the Pyrenees.
Each adventure is woven with findings in mythology and anthropology, natural history and neuroscience, literature and philosophy. In elegant and graceful prose, Hunt cures us of our "surface chauvinism," opening our eyes to the planet's hidden dimension. He reveals how the subterranean landscape gave shape to our most basic beliefs and guided how we think about ourselves as humans. At bottom, Underground is a meditation on the allure of darkness, the power of mystery, and our eternal desire to connect with what we cannot see.
Praise for Underground
"A mesmerizingly fascinating tale . . . I could not stop reading this beautifully written book." --Michael Finkel, author of The Stranger in the Woods
"Few books have blown my mind so totally, and so often. In Will Hunt's nimble hands, excursion becomes inversion, and the darkness turns luminous. There are echoes of Sebald, Calvino, and Herzog in his elegant and enigmatic voice, but also real warmth and humor. . . . An intrepid--but far from fearless--journey, both theoretically and terrestrially." --Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author of On Trails
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Urban explorer Hunt serves as a genial guide to the clandestine communities, unexpected lives, and hidden histories existing in subterranean realms. More travelogue than history, the book allows the reader to follow Hunt as he traverses the catacombs of Paris, ochre mines of Australia, underground cities of Turkey, and subway tunnels of New York City, in the last locale searching for a famed graffiti artist's elusive work. Along the way, Hunt introduces readers to fascinating people obsessed with the underground, including the flamboyant 19th-century French photographer Nadar, who documented Paris's catacombs using one of the first artificial lighting systems in the history of photography, and English engineer William Lyttle, "the Mole Man of Hackney," discovered in the early 2000s to have been secretly tunneling beneath his northeast London house for decades. At times, Hunt's claims for his subject's importance can be grandiose ("Underground worlds... have guided how we think of ourselves and given shape to our humanity"), but he is always entertaining, and this brisk work, rife with intriguing characters and little-known traditions and communities, will leave many readers wanting to dig deeper into the worlds hiding beneath their feet. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Since the birth of human civilization, caves and underground chambers have aroused fascination and terror in anyone stumbling across them. The nonfiction debut of avowed underworld enthusiast Hunt explores the mythology and mixed emotions provoked by these mysterious, hidden recesses while providing a fascinating if sometimes unsettling travelogue of his many dimly lit explorations. Hunt's passion for tunnels, caves, and abandoned mines took him to long-shuttered New York subway stations inhabited by homeless mole people, the labyrinthine, bone-littered catacombs beneath Paris, and an Australian ochre mine, among other rarely seen subterranean spaces. Interwoven throughout his adventures are stories of such pioneers as the nineteenth-century French photographer, Felix Nadar, whose striking prints of the Paris sewer system transformed it into a tourist attraction, and Ohioan John Symmes, whose efforts to lead an expedition to the earth's core inspired Jules Verne. Hunt's rich descriptions of dark and forbidden subterranean landscapes will raise goose bumps while offering a unique history of a culturally and scientifically important netherworld most people barely know exists.--Carl Hays Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A book can often have its greatest impact by rethinking familiar terrain, forcing readers to reconsider their entrenched preconceptions. Sometimes this comes from embracing an unexpected vantage point, as in Howard Zinn's classic "A Peopie's History of the United States," which chronicled American history from the bottom up rather than the top down. The sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh's work examines the unseen economic and social forces operating all around us; his last book, "Floating City: Hustlers, Strivers, Dealers, Call Girls and Other Lives in Illicit New York," has forever colored my interactions with the city's hotel concierges, bartenders and bodega owners. Will Hunt taps into our deep fascination with what lies beneath the surface of things by exploring, quite literally, what's going on beneath the surface. His book, "Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet," delves into the natural and manufactured caves, catacombs, mines and tunnels that dot the globe in both urban and rural settings. Using assorted scientists, tribesmen, urban adventurers and other locals as his guides, Hunt has spent years burrowing into the most storied holes in the grounds. In following his journey - from New York's subways to the Parisian catacombs and from Australian ochre mines to the prehistoric caves of the French Pyrenees - it soon becomes clear that Hunt is less interested in what he actually finds underground than in his own obsession with this dark world. Yes, we encounter plenty of graffiti, cave paintings, stalactites, subterranean creatures and remnants of religious rituals. But "Underground" is most concerned with understanding the fixation, shared by humans for millenniums, with these hidden realms. The connections Hunt makes - for instance, between his own experience as a teenager exploring an abandoned train tunnel in Providence, R.I., and a young Mexican man who discovered the walled sanctuary within the ancient Mayan Balankanche cave - sometimes feel strained. Similarly, some of his sweeping conclusions (for instance, that "our connection to caves may well be our most universal, most deeply inscribed, perhaps our original religious tradition") seem overblown. That said, if not taken too seriously, Hunt's musings on our relationship to the underground world, drawing on literary, academic and mythological sources, are both provocative and satisfying. The real pleasure of "Underground," however, is not to be found in its philosophical reflections. Rather it is in simply following Hunt on his quest, meeting those he encounters along the way and learning about those who came before. Whether attempting to traverse the entire six-mile length of Paris underground (spoiler alert: He doesn't quite pull it off), tracking down the mysterious New York subway graffiti artist who over six years produced 235 large autobiographical panels in the tunnels, or profiling the original entrepreneurs who figured out subterranean photography and mapmaking, Hunt proves an able chaperone. At the end of your excursion through "Underground," you are unlikely to partake in Hunt's longtime obsession. But you may never look at a hole in the ground in quite the same way again.
Guardian Review
Parisian sewers, old gold mines and the Mole Man of Hackney in a thrilling celebration of the subterranean When I was a child, around the corner from my home in east London lived a man named William Lyttle. For decades Lyttle had been digging a series of tunnels underneath his house. His activities had made him something of a local celebrity, nicknamed "the Mole Man of Hackney", but when one of his tunnels collapsed, causing a huge crater to form in the street outside his house, the council evicted him and filled in his excavations with concrete. He lived out the last few years of his life far above the ground in a high-rise block. The Mole Man of Hackney, Will Hunt argues in his winningly obsessive history of our relationship with underground places, might best be understood as an evolutionary throwback. As a species, he says, humankind has always been fascinated with what lies beneath the surface of the world. This obsession had practical origins - we descended underground to mine precious minerals, or to seek protection from enemies and predators - but it also served more spiritual purposes. The ancient Greeks went into caves in search of visions and wisdom. At Lascaux and Chauvet the Magdalenians, sophisticated pre-modern peoples who lived in western Europe during the Palaeolithic era, drew extraordinary pictures on their walls. Hunt first became interested in such places when, as a teenager, a teacher told him about an abandoned railway tunnel that ran near his home in Providence, Rhode Island. He broke in with some friends and was entranced by the strangeness of the subterranean world he had uncovered, and the sense of transgression exploring it provided. He has been going underground ever since. "For more than a decade," he writes, "I climbed down into stony catacombs and derelict subway stations, sacred caves, and nuclear bunkers. It began as a quest to understand my own preoccupation; but with each descent ... a more universal story emerged. I saw that we - all of us, the human species - have always felt a quiet pull from the underground, that we are as connected to this realm as we are to our own shadows." The book captures a series of descents: into the ground, but also into literature, the visual arts and the psyche, too Underground is an account of a series of descents: into the ground, but also into literature and the visual arts, and into the psyche, too. One of the attractions of subterranean places, Hunt observes, is that their meanings are hard to exhaust, partly because we still know so little about them, making them ripe for spiritual association and speculation. The furthest humans have been below the surface, down the Kola Borehole in Russia, is 12.2km: a measly 0.5% of the distance to the Earth's core. It is an environment that can never be properly seen, or, at least, never be seen all at once. "In its obscurity," Hunt says, "the underground is our planet's most abstract landscape, always more metaphor than space." Much contemporary place writing can tend to the ponderous, taking us on lyrical safaris through depopulated natural landscapes, but the great virtue of this book is that many of Hunt's excursions have the narrative drive of adventure stories. Much of what he describes is genuinely exciting. In one chapter he traverses the whole of Paris underground, travelling with an international band of "urban explorers" in a single uninterrupted journey - a Jules Verne-ish romp in which the group camp by sewer outflows on hammocks strung up on the tunnel walls. He visits the underground cities of Cappadocia in central Turkey, and caves in South America in which human sacrifice was once practised. He descends a mile beneath the surface of the Earth into an old gold mine in South Dakota, now used by biologists working with Nasa to study the strange life forms that dwell there. (There is some evidence, Hunt reports, that life on earth first emerged not in the primordial soup but deep underground, in places like this.) Another strength is Hunt's personableness, and his sensitivity to different ways of relating to the places he is so fascinated by. He seems able to talk himself into anywhere. In Australia he seeks out an Indigenous Australian elder who knows the secret songlines of the ochre mines; later he talks to a Native American scholar to try to understand their cave-based origin myths. In one of the best chapters he links the work of the New York graffiti artist Revs - who spent a decade spray-painting entries from a long, interconnected diary in out-of-the-way spots under Manhattan - with the work of a group of anonymous Palaeolithic people who, 14,000 years ago, in a cave in southwest France named Le Tuc d'Audoubert, made a pair of astonishingly beautiful sculptures of bison. In a chamber in the cave next to the sculptures you can still make out their footprints, trodden into the clay while they worked. Underground is also beautifully written. Hunt is attuned to the smells and textures of subterranean places (in the dark, visual comparisons don't get you very far), to the "earthy, almost pastoral aroma, like rain-soaked chalk" of the Paris catacombs, and the "old farm shed full of fertiliser" he smells in the New York sewer system. Below Manhattan on summer nights, he says, "you can almost smell the city's granite bedrock". Hunt's instincts are journalistic rather than scholarly, however, and if I have one frustration with this book it is that it contains no notes or bibliography. When Hunt tells us that "One 17th-century writer" described entering a cave in Somerset saying "We began to be afraid to visit it, for although we entered in frolicksome and merry, yet we might return out of it sad and pensive and never more to be seen to laugh whilst we lived in the world", I wanted to know who this was (Google has not helped). The lack of citations makes me wonder how accurate some his quotations are, too. I find it difficult to believe that the splenetic William Lyttle ever said "I guess I'm a man who enjoys digging". I also wonder whether I agree with his central premise: that we are all as obsessed with the underground as he is. He believes we are drawn to the subterranean world because we are neurologically primed to descend. "Evolutionary psychologists," he writes, "have suggested that even our most archaic ancestral relationships to landscapes never quite fade, that they become wired in our nervous system, manifest in unconscious instincts that continue to govern our behaviour." We go underground, he suggests, because our brains contain some trace memories of the places from which we first emerged, or because we enjoy the experience of sensory dislocation we experience when we get there (in one chapter he camps out in a cave for 24 hours in search of visions, but isn't very successful). Can this really be true? After all, we've lived above ground far longer than we lived below it (if we ever did), and it's surely only very few of us who actually like going underground, anyway. The rest are quite happy to stay in the light, hearing about what lies beneath at one remove, through the stories and visions of our shamans and seers, and of adventurers like Hunt.
Kirkus Review
An unusual and intriguing travel book, into the world beneath the world we know.In his debut, Hunt begins modestly before revealing larger ambitions. His obsession with the underground started with an abandoned train tunnel he explored as a teenager, and his fascination would ultimately lead him through underground passageways of Paris and New York City, Aboriginal mines of Australia, and other wondrous places. His early experiences, he writes, "seized me with a ferocity that turned my entire imagination inside-out, fundamentally altering the way I thought about myself, and my place in the greater architecture of the world." The author casts himself among the "urban explorers" of the world below street level and "the Mole People, the homeless men and women who lived in hidden nooks and vaults." His earliest guide to this secret world was a photographer he describes as "a dashing and brilliant and possibly deranged individual." As Hunt reveals the scientific, historic, literary, psychological, spiritual, and metaphorical qualities of his exploration, it begins to seem less idiosyncratic than universal, a pull that has persisted throughout civilization and a mystery that has yet to be solved. The underground may represent hell to some, but it has also provided spiritual solace for centuries. Pilgrims have felt themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves, and they have left human sacrifices to cruel gods and created graffiti, paintings, or elaborate sculptures that so few would ever see. They have mined the underground for earthly riches, and they have all but lost their minds to its sensory deprivation. Without belaboring the point, Hunt alludes to conjecture that all of life might have started underground, that it retains a revelatory diversity, and that the level below the Earth could be a womb as well as a tomb. Ultimately, he compellingly examines "how much of our existence remains in mystery, how much of reality continues to elude us, and how much deeper our world runs beyond what we know."A vivid illumination of the dark and an effective evocation of its profound mystery. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In an era when many adventurers look to other worlds for discovery, Hunt (visiting scholar, Inst. for Public Knowledge, New York Univ.) goes in the opposite direction, burrowing into the shafts and tunnels leading into the earth. The author leads readers into abandoned train tunnels, Parisian sewers, old mines, and Australian ochre shafts. Hunt succeeds on a number of levels: daringly investigating the bowels of big city sewer lines, as an anthropologist among various cultures and archaeologist exploring long-forgotten ruins. Along the way, readers gain an appreciation of places and peoples seldom discussed, including the residents of sewers and other "intraterrestrial" voyagers. There's also a deeper layer to this work, such as discussions of origin stories, including Native American and Aboriginal Australian perspectives. Hunt is a pleasure to read; each page-like the subject matter at hand-offers a different and unexpected turn. VERDICT This unique book is a real-life Journey to the Center of the Earth, a maze of dark corners and subterranean denizens that encompass unknown or forgotten worlds. The text maintains a fascinating, eerie, and otherworldly tone throughout and is too unique not to consider.-Jeffrey Meyer, Mt. Pleasant P.L., IA © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.