Intriguing and often entertaining reading on a phenomenon that seems timeless.
A brief historical excavation of bunkers and in-depth exploration of their present-day use, when they “are built not so much in response to one single imminent catastrophe, but out of a more general sense of disquiet.”
For millennia, humans have been digging underground for shelter and to avoid disasters, but cultural geographer Garrett is primarily interested in the bunkers built by militias, survivalists, and preppers. This is the “hardened architecture” of dread, an expression of our 21st-century anxieties and insecurities, “the dominant affect of our era.” From his geographic/ethnographic perspective, Garrett is a capable writer with a crisp, detailed, visual quality to his work, and he brings a gratifying participant approach to this investigation. The author intended to meet the preppers to get a sense of what made them tick (paranoia, practicality, or a mixture of both?), and while he was able to take the measure of some, many were too secretive to reveal too much. Garrett discovered that preppers are motivated by a number of forces, from the scientific to the spiritual. Appalled by a government that has abandoned its responsibility to protect its citizens and a socio-economic system that has fostered alienation and an increased need for self-defense, they dread the prospect of a desperate, voracious human population fighting over dwindling resources. Most interesting are the author’s accounts of his visits to a variety of bunker complexes, including DIY homestead operations, abandoned ICBM silos, and Australian fire bunkers, “oxygen-filled cocoons that look remarkably similar to the nuclear shelters that Americans built in a panic during the first doom boom in the early years of the Cold War.” Garrett finds that many complexes are little more than a combination of wishful thinking and unexecuted plans, and he also avers that communities are crucial, transitions inevitable, and some prepping highly practical. Regarding the last, the author’s “Acronym and Argot Glossary” is helpful for readers unfamiliar with the lingo.
Intriguing and often entertaining reading on a phenomenon that seems timeless.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8855-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
