Underland
A Deep Time Journey
Book - 2019
In Underland, Macfarland delivers his masterpiece: an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. He takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through "deep time" - the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present - he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come.
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Publisher:
New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2019
Edition:
First American edition
ISBN:
9780393242140
0393242145
0393242145
Branch Call Number:
551.447 M1649U 2019
Characteristics:
viii, 488 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
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Add a CommentThis book defies categorizations. It covers all (well, damn near all) things underground from the "world wood web," underground cities, underground rivers, caves, and forgotten burial sites among other things. It's a weird intersectional book but it's my kind of weird.
story started out great, but lost interest half way through. Author is very poetic and philosophical, not my favorite style
This book is not about nature; the prose is far too florid and the book is far too long; Euro-centric.
MacFarlane is an unusual combination of scholar, gifted writer, keen observer of nature, and outdoor adventurer. When he writes about the Underland - burial places, caves, glaciers, underground rivers - he has personally explored these places, many quite dangerous, and writes about them evocatively and poetically as only someone with firsthand experience can. Also explored are soil, mines, deep sea drilling, and nuclear waste storage, mostly in northern Europe. One of the most fascinating journeys is a multi-day expedition into the 200 mile network of the Paris catacombs with "cataphiles", a subculture of individuals who adhere to an unwritten code of conduct in the invisible city while flouting the law by being there. MacFarlane’s word imagery is powerful and visceral, but the single photo at the beginning of each chapter is frustratingly insufficient in conveying the magnificence, or poignance, of the Underland.
There isn't a category for the death-defying but detailed science of exploring caves, glaciers and ancient myths. Great book for travel - you will feel in another world no matter where you are reading.
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Many of us are in awe of the vastness of the surface of our planet and the skies we gaze at. Robert MacFarlane shows us the vastness of what lies beneath the earth we walk on and the waters we sail across. It's another universe altogether, terrifying in ways. This book is an important piece of work.
A haunting journey into the planet's past and future. Huge in the UK.
What a book! It took me to places I will never visit and did so in such an erudite and poetic way that I feel privileged to have read it.