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Bunker

Building for the End Times

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Bunker

By: Bradley Garrett
Narrated by: Adam Sims
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Since prehistory, bunkers have been built as protection from cataclysmic social and environmental forces, and as places of power and transformation. 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.

© Bradley Garrett 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 Architecture Future Studies Political Science Politics & Government Religious Studies Social Sciences

Critic 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)
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)
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)
Brilliant ... Bunker, self-evidently a work for our times, shimmers with a Ballardian imagery of disaster and melt-down. (Ian Thomson)
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)
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)
This study of bunker sites and the people preparing for the worst couldn't be better timed. (Andrew Anthony)
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)
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.
Garrett is a bright and buoyant guide and Bunker rattles briskly along ... A necessary read.
All stars
Most relevant
very interesting I do believe there is going to be more bunkers built the world is panicking with all this covid stuff happening

bunker

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A fabulous, interesting listen and really enjoyed it. BG tells a fascinating story and shares very insightful and informative knowledge and experiences. The test, will I listen again? Yup, definitely!!! 😉

I’m prepped

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The author has done a great job-the research and the scope of travel alone is quite mind boggling. The book is very well written. It is very interesting and the narration is beautiful.

What a great look inside the prepped world!

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I was on the side lines as to whether to listen to this, really glad I did.
Memorable because of the metaphors such as transformation and rebirth.
The end chapter on Chenobyl was a bonus.
This book reads like a Dean Koontz novel - and the narrator did this title justice.

Unexpectedly riveting and engaging

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As my title says this is a "memorising insight into a hidden world"
I would recommend this read to those that have an interest in prepping or interest history off bunkers or anyone that may have thought that bunkers were just for the crazy.

Memorising insight into a hidden world

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