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Off The Map: Lost Space, Feral Places And Invisible Cities And What They Tell Us About The World (2014)

by Alastair Bonnett(Favorite Author)

3.5 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1781312575 (ISBN13: 9781781312575)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Aurum

review 1: A clever and fun and thoughtful account of places that are off the map--- what Bonnett calls "lost spaces". Bonnett tours geographies that are messy, forgotten, lost, fading, abandoned--- ghost mining towns, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, imaginary islands, once-and-former secret cities in Siberia, slivers of urban space unaccounted for on tax rolls and deeds ---to look at how a world of GPS and Google Earth still hasn't been reduced to cartographic fixity and at how humans respond to place and memory. From comedy--- the twin Dutch and Belgian towns that overlap one another like some China Mieville novel ---to tragedy (Indian enclaves within Bangladesh where the locals are trapped between bureaucratic mandates and pushed out of schools and hospitals; North Korean prison cam... moreps; asbestos mining towns in the Australian west), Bonnett lays out a series of small essays that are delightful and haunting and occasionally disturbing. Very much worth reading.
review 2: Written by a British professor who thinks that it is a meaningful exercise in urban exploration to try to navigate a daycare center while using a map of the Berlin subway system. A little too performance art-like and not enough factual explanations.To add to the disappointment, most places he describes have longitude and latitude given in a difficult traditional form. For example 14º34'56"N, 192º45'12"E. He calls these "Google Earth" coordinates. But in fact they can not be easily entered into Google Earth. Decimal degrees are far easier to enter, for instance 46.28871, -12.98225 works for me.The book is a bit too metaphysical for me, I would have preferred more about the geographical oddities. I found the lecturing tedious, and especially did not like the baseless political criticisms of Israel. less

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