Read Underground A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet Will Hunt 9780812996746 Books

Product details Hardcover 288 pages Publisher Spiegel & Grau (January 29, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0812996747

Underground A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet Will Hunt 9780812996746 Books Reviews

• Beneath my feet lies a 300 million-year-old petrified rainforest– the second largest in the world. Pictures of it can be seen here. It’s incredible to imagine that this snowy countryside was once a tropical rainforest and that its remains are now buried deep below where I stand today. Scientific proof of what once was. Do you ever wonder about what used to be? Do you wonder about what can’t be seen.
  
  Will Hunt’s curiosity about the unknown began the summer he turned 16, when he discovered an abandoned train tunnel that ran under his neighborhood. It was this experience that eventually launched his passion for urban exploring- a hobby that allowed him to travel all over the world as he sought out abandoned subway platforms (ghost stations), dodged police officers in foreign countries, and encountered “Mole People”. While in the Catacombs of Paris, he even came across an underground library, La Librairie, where urban explorers left books for others to borrow. Oh, my soul!
  
  I saw that we- all of us, the human species- have always felt a quiet pull from the underground, that we are connected to this realm as we are to our own shadow.
  
  I must say my favorite bit may have been the story about the “Mole Man of Hackney” who decided to dig a wine cellar in his basement and never stopped. He kept burrowing until his home started to collapse. In his words, “I just have a big basement.”
  
  Underground by Will Hunt was fascinating and really well done! If you are a fan of traveling from your couch or, like me, are simply saving your cabbage and working all the side hustles so you can travel in real life, this is the book for you! Hearing about his expeditions energized my sense of adventure and learning the science of the “worlds beneath our feet” caused me to look at things from a whole new perspective. Microbiologists keep finding life deeper and deeper inside the earth and are even discovering pockets of water that are more than a billion years old. In addition, it’s estimated that more than half of the world’s caves are undiscovered! We explore outer space, but there is so much to find here- our oceans and underground landscapes are just as much a mystery.
• I enjoyed this book more than anything I've read in a long time. The author takes you on a guided adventure into the subterranean world beneath your feet with passion and insight. He joins the urban explorers in their underground (and illegal) journeys through the subway tunnels and sewers of New York and Paris, ventures deep into abandoned mines and Mayan ritual caves. This was a page-turner and a can't-put-it-down kind of book. I was sad when I came to the end of it. Highly recommended.
• I first heard Will Hunt on the radio in my car discussing his book. There was something about Will's affable enthusiasm toward his unlikely subject that hooked me. Once I started reading I was mesmerized by the connections with human history and mythology he lays out for the reader. Expertly interlacing his personal experience with stories of those that have gone underground before him, experiments conducted and all manner of subject matter related to what happens to our senses as we descend from the surface. The research is astounding but he invites you to imagine you're with him on an underground excursion and to tie yourself both to the skylarking aspect of jumping a subway tunnel barrier and to ancestral rituals from the dawning of humankind.
• This isn’t a book I’d normally gravitate toward (my non-fiction tastes skew heavily toward politics, economics). But I absolutely couldn’t put this book down! It’s a blend of science, philosophy, mythology and New Yorker-esque profiles of fascinating characters you’ve never heard of but suddenly want to know everything about. In the end, it’s a book about mystery and self-discovery, and the beautiful way those two concepts intertwine. Highly recommend!
• Will Hunt's incredibly beautiful prose and infectious sense of wonder carried me from chapter to chapter. When it was over, I wished there were another 200 pages. This book is a remarkable achievement and I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about cities, archaeology, ancient civilizations, biology, the human species, psychology, mythology -- this book has it all. And the writing is so good.
• I was totally blown away by this book. It opened a new (and old) world that I had only known tiny glimpses of. The writing is absolutely tasty and very well researched. I can't wait to see what else he produces - I will read them all!
• Hunt makes dirt sound like a song; he weaves poetry out of pitch black.
• What a fascinating subject...in the right hands. Will Hunt is no Bill Bryson, and the intrinsically interesting topic of worlds beneath our feet is simply ground down by sparse facts interlaced with the author's not-so-interesting personal experiences. Full disclosure I haven't finished reading the book. I gave up after the dull story of Hunt's traverse of the Paris sewers with a band of tame colleagues. Not that I can write better - I can't - but as a reader, I'm waiting for someone else to take this topic and give it the full attention it deserves.