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.

December 22, 2014
From urban fox dens to micro-nations to temporary islands, Bonnet explores strange geography and ungrounded spaces found throughout the world. It is a veritable travelogue into unknown and limbo-like states. Perkins speaks in a deep voice and a refined British accent that can be hypnotically engaging when combined with Bonnet’s prose. His steady narrative pace regularly shifts in tone as needed, capturing the excitement of Bonnet’s travels exploring 50 different places. For each location, coordinates are given (when possible) according to Google maps. This addition makes sense for the book, but it feels distracting in the audiobook as it is not as easy to recall or search for when listening. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover.