What Da Cover Says: A tour of the world’s hidden geographies—from disappearing islands to forbidden deserts—and a stunning testament to how mysterious the world remains today. At a time when Google Maps Street View can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite’s remotest trails and cell phones double as navigational systems, it’s hard to imagine there’s any uncharted ground left on the planet. In Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination.
Bonnett’s remarkable tour includes moving villages, secret cities, no man’s lands, and floating islands. He explores places as disorienting as Sandy Island, an island included on maps until just two years ago despite the fact that it never existed. Or Sealand, an abandoned gun platform off the English coast that a British citizen claimed as his own sovereign nation, issuing passports and crowning his wife as a princess. Or Baarle, a patchwork of Dutch and Flemish enclaves where walking from the grocery store’s produce section to the meat counter can involve crossing national borders.
An intrepid guide down the road much less travelled, Bonnett reveals that the most extraordinary places on earth might be hidden in plain sight, just around the corner from your apartment or underfoot on a wooded path. Perfect for urban explorers, wilderness ramblers, and armchair travellers struck by wanderlust, Unruly Places will change the way you see the places you inhabit.
What I Says: When you think of the world today you always assume that we have discovered everything, each piece of land is owned and there aren’t any unknowns left for us to discover. What this book shows us is that those thoughts are wrong, whether it is a strip of land between buildings, floating pumice islands, no-mans land or an abandoned gun platform out in the sea, there are still many remarkable places for us to discover and explore.
I found the psychology of what a place means to us the most interesting part of this book, Bonnett would start talking about a type of place, strips of unused land between building in cities for example, I would instantly think you can’t include that in the list but each time he convinced me that it deserved to be included. Once you start using you imagination these sorts of places really come alive with potential, imagine what you could witness happening around you whilst the world moves on….hmmm starting to sound like a peeping tom now. My favourite weird place in the book was a sandy island that had always been included on maps but when somebody went looking for it there was nothing there, google maps did the only logical thing and did an awful photoshop jobbie of removing the island from existence, look it up, hilarious.
There was only one location included that I had heard of before, Sealand, an incredible story of a breakaway English nation living on an abandoned platform at see, the self proclaimed king stood his ground against English law and foreign invaders. Each time I read of Sealand in a book I always end going off on a google adventure reading up on the tiny nation.
I have to admit that I found this book rather frustrating, it is jammed packed with so many interesting and strange places but Bonnett seems to get bored quickly and rushes onto the next location, I would have loved some photos, or interviews of the locals, or just more info about the place to answer all the many questions I had, for a while I did spend time on google but gave up as I was spending more time looking at the screen and not at the book.
I did enjoy the book but it would have been far better with less places included and more time spent on those that did make the cut.
Gnome Appreciation Society 