Quick Reads: "Unruly Places" by Alastair Bonnett
Mother Jones
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Unruly Places
By Alastair Bonnett
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
By now, given the pace of technology, you’d think every square inch of the planet’s surface had already been discovered, scrutinized, and made accessible online. In this catalog of the world’s forgotten, ignored, and phantom places, British geographer Alastair Bonnett shows us that our maps still hold plenty of secrets. Take Wittenoom, an asbestos-mining center turned ghost town in Western Australia that vanished from official records—but not from the face of the earth. Or the no man’s land between Senegal and Guinea that is host to entire nationless villages. There’s also Sandy Island, a South Pacific sandbar that existed on Google Earth until 2012—when an Australian expedition discovered that it never actually existed. The geography of the unknown has never been so comprehensible.
This review originally appeared in our July/August issue of Mother Jones.
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