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Bunker
Bunker
Nov 23, 2024 9:24 PM

Author:Bradley Garrett

Bunker

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020

'An extraordinary achievement . . . gripping, grim and witty' Robert MacFarlane

'Unputdown-able ... No book could be more timely' Richard J Evans

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.

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

A kind of apocalyptic Super Size Me, in which the author force feeds himself a steady diet of paranoia, conspiracy, eschatology and end-times architecture.

—— Chris Hall , The Guardian

This baseball-cap wearing academic is the world's leading expert on survivalists ... But he never expected Bunker to be so topical.

—— Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson , The Times

Brilliant ... Bunker, self-evidently a work for our times, shimmers with a Ballardian imagery of disaster and melt-down.

—— Ian Thomson , The Spectator

Bunker is a thoughtful study into the nature of paranoia and the people who try to profit from it - and it makes for a page-turning read.

—— Nathan Brooker , Financial Times

A scary, unputdown-able account ... No book could be more timely as we stay in our own little bunkers to avoid infection, strip the supermarket shelves of loo paper, and squirrel away supplies of food to see us through the shortages that many fear will follow a no-deal Brexit.

—— Richard J Evans , New Statesman

This study of bunker sites and the people preparing for the worst couldn't be better timed.

—— Andrew Anthony , The Observer

Garrett's research has involved hanging out with millenarian fruitcakes, disaster profiteers and the uber-rich, not to mention tooled-up, swivel-eyed anarcho-libertarians from America to Australia ... His sense is that disaster gives us an opportunity to rethink how we live. What will we learn?

—— Stuart Jeffries , The Guardian

This is a gripping and timely book about both the 'architecture of dread' and its multi-billion dollar industry, and what the growing appetite for bunkers reveals about the social conditions in which we live.

—— New Statesman

Garrett is a bright and buoyant guide and Bunker rattles briskly along ... A necessary read.

—— Literary Review

Bradley Garrett spent three years meeting doomsday preppers for his book Bunker ... If we work together, he thinks, there is no reason that a future global catastrophe has to become an apocalypse. Well, that's something.

—— Luke Mintz , Sunday Telegraph

Bunker is an extraordinary achievement; a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege and apocalypse told through the space of the bunker. Garrett has written a gripping, grim, witty work of geography and ethnography, which he completed - with eerie timeliness - in the first weeks of the COVID pandemic. A book about prepping and prognostication, then, which had already foretold its own future.

—— Robert MacFarlane

Garrett's book forces readers to reassess other assumptions about bunkers and those who own them.

—— Jack Grove , Times Higher Education

There are many strands in this book ... [Garrett] brings sharp insight to a subject that no longer seems so remote or speculative.

—— Mika Ross-Southall , Times Literary Supplement

A highly addictive book ... What makes Garrett's book fascinating is his portrayal of the balance between fringe thinking and the real world.

—— Nick Smith , E&T Magazine

Bunker benefits from the mere fact of taking its protagonists seriously as humans and as members of society, rather than as outlandish characters.

—— Julian Sayarer , openDemocracy

Garrett spent several years travelling the world, going down into bunkers and talking to their owners and tenants. His book is an incredible record of that journey, and also functions as a philosophical or psychological disquisition about space, about freedom, about survival. Bunker is an incredible read and will surely sell in quite enormous numbers, assuming the human race remains intact and can still read.

—— Steve Braunias , New Zealand Herald

Sam Harris is a true public intellectual: he thinks deeply about a wide range of issues and engages fearlessly with controversial topics and unpopular opinions. You don't have to agree with him to learn from him—I always come away from his show with new insights and new questions.

—— Adam Grant, author of Originals and Give and Take, and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

This podcast is perfectly named. Sam makes sense of important, difficult, and often controversial topics with deep preparation, sharp questions, and intellectual fearlessness. More, please!

—— Andrew McAfee, author of More from Less and coauthor of The Second Machine Age

There are precious few spaces in the media landscape where difficult, rigorous and respectful conversations can play out at substantial length, without agenda. Sam Harris created the model for such illuminating exchange, and the Making Sense podcast is a treasure trove of discussions with many of the most compelling and fascinating minds of our era.

—— Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of Self Portrait in Black and White

Making Sense is a refuelling station for the mind, and I visit it regularly. As an interviewer, Sam is both rigorous and generous. His show is completely devoid of the cheap shots and tribal bickering that characterize so much of podcasting. Making Sense is joyful play of the mind, without a trace of the partisan cretinism that disfigures the vast majority of our discourse these days.

—— Graeme Wood, author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State

Making Sense is one of the most thought-provoking podcasts that I've come across. Sam Harris does an incredible job probing—and finding answers to—some of the most important questions of our times.

—— Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene: An Intimate History

Whether the discussion is about artificial intelligence, the future capacities of knowledge, politics, philosophy, intuition, history (philosopher Thomas Metzinger shares experiences from post–World War II Germany that are hard to look away from), religion, reason, or the nature of consciousness, Harris grounds lofty discussions with concrete examples and his gift for analogy . . . free and open debate, in the best sense of the word . . . the book’s advantage over the podcast is that readers can linger as they need to and cherry-pick interviews at will. Recommended for anyone who wants to spend time with intelligent minds wrestling not with each other but with understanding.

—— Kirkus Reviews

One of the most eloquent and inspiring memoirs of recent years... A Dutiful Boy is real-life storytelling at its finest

—— Mr Porter, *Summer Reads of 2021*

Mohsin Zaidi...in a compassionate, compelling and humorous way, tells his story of seeking acceptance within the gay community, and within the Muslim community in which he grew up

—— Gilllian Carty , Scottish Legal News

A powerful portrayal of being able to live authentically despite all the odds

—— Mike Findlay , Scotsman

Zaidi's affecting memoir recounts his journey growing up in east London in a devout Muslim household. He has a secret, one he cannot share with anyone - he is gay. When he moves away to study at Oxford he finds, for the first time, the possibility of living his life authentically. The dissonance this causes in him - of finding a way to accept himself while knowing his family will not do the same - is so sensitively depicted. One of the most moving chapters includes him coming home to a witch doctor, who his family has summoned to "cure" him. This is an incredibly important read, full of hope.

—— Jyoti Patel, The Guardian

A beautifully written book, a lovely story, life-affirming

—— Jeremy Vine

Zaidi's account is raw, honest and at times quite painful to read. It's so vivid that it feels almost tangible, as though you're living the experiences of the author himself.

—— Vogue

This heartfelt and honest book is beautifully written and full of hope

—— The New Arab
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