Underground

November 5, 2018
Urban explorer Hunt serves as a genial guide to the clandestine communities, unexpected lives, and hidden histories existing in subterranean realms. More travelogue than history, the book allows the reader to follow Hunt as he traverses the catacombs of Paris, ochre mines of Australia, underground cities of Turkey, and subway tunnels of New York City, in the last locale searching for a famed graffiti artist’s elusive work. Along the way, Hunt introduces readers to fascinating people obsessed with the underground, including the flamboyant 19th-century French photographer Nadar, who documented Paris’s catacombs using one of the first artificial lighting systems in the history of photography, and English engineer William Lyttle, “the Mole Man of Hackney,” discovered in the early 2000s to have been secretly tunneling beneath his northeast London house for decades. At times, Hunt’s claims for his subject’s importance can be grandiose (“Underground worlds... have guided how we think of ourselves and given shape to our humanity”), but he is always entertaining, and this brisk work, rife with intriguing characters and little-known traditions and communities, will leave many readers wanting to dig deeper into the worlds hiding beneath their feet. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency.

December 1, 2018
Since the birth of human civilization, caves and underground chambers have aroused fascination and terror in anyone stumbling across them. The nonfiction debut of avowed underworld enthusiast Hunt explores the mythology and mixed emotions provoked by these mysterious, hidden recesses while providing a fascinating if sometimes unsettling travelogue of his many dimly lit explorations. Hunt's passion for tunnels, caves, and abandoned mines took him to long-shuttered New York subway stations inhabited by homeless mole people, the labyrinthine, bone-littered catacombs beneath Paris, and an Australian ochre mine, among other rarely seen subterranean spaces. Interwoven throughout his adventures are stories of such pioneers as the nineteenth-century French photographer, Felix Nadar, whose striking prints of the Paris sewer system transformed it into a tourist attraction, and Ohioan John Symmes, whose efforts to lead an expedition to the earth's core inspired Jules Verne. Hunt's rich descriptions of dark and forbidden subterranean landscapes will raise goose bumps while offering a unique history of a culturally and scientifically important netherworld most people barely know exists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from March 1, 2019

In an era when many adventurers look to other worlds for discovery, Hunt (visiting scholar, Inst. for Public Knowledge, New York Univ.) goes in the opposite direction, burrowing into the shafts and tunnels leading into the earth. The author leads readers into abandoned train tunnels, Parisian sewers, old mines, and Australian ochre shafts. Hunt succeeds on a number of levels: daringly investigating the bowels of big city sewer lines, as an anthropologist among various cultures and archaeologist exploring long-forgotten ruins. Along the way, readers gain an appreciation of places and peoples seldom discussed, including the residents of sewers and other "intraterrestrial" voyagers. There's also a deeper layer to this work, such as discussions of origin stories, including Native American and Aboriginal Australian perspectives. Hunt is a pleasure to read; each page--like the subject matter at hand--offers a different and unexpected turn. VERDICT This unique book is a real-life Journey to the Center of the Earth, a maze of dark corners and subterranean denizens that encompass unknown or forgotten worlds. The text maintains a fascinating, eerie, and otherworldly tone throughout and is too unique not to consider.--Jeffrey Meyer, Mt. Pleasant P.L., IA

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2019

In a different kind of history, backed by big in-house hopes, grant- and fellowship-worthy Hunt crawls down into deep, dark holes to explore the history, science, and mythology of the caves and catacombs, subway systems, and deserted mines that exist beneath our feet.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2018
An unusual and intriguing travel book, into the world beneath the world we know.In his debut, Hunt begins modestly before revealing larger ambitions. His obsession with the underground started with an abandoned train tunnel he explored as a teenager, and his fascination would ultimately lead him through underground passageways of Paris and New York City, Aboriginal mines of Australia, and other wondrous places. His early experiences, he writes, "seized me with a ferocity that turned my entire imagination inside-out, fundamentally altering the way I thought about myself, and my place in the greater architecture of the world." The author casts himself among the "urban explorers" of the world below street level and "the Mole People, the homeless men and women who lived in hidden nooks and vaults." His earliest guide to this secret world was a photographer he describes as "a dashing and brilliant and possibly deranged individual." As Hunt reveals the scientific, historic, literary, psychological, spiritual, and metaphorical qualities of his exploration, it begins to seem less idiosyncratic than universal, a pull that has persisted throughout civilization and a mystery that has yet to be solved. The underground may represent hell to some, but it has also provided spiritual solace for centuries. Pilgrims have felt themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves, and they have left human sacrifices to cruel gods and created graffiti, paintings, or elaborate sculptures that so few would ever see. They have mined the underground for earthly riches, and they have all but lost their minds to its sensory deprivation. Without belaboring the point, Hunt alludes to conjecture that all of life might have started underground, that it retains a revelatory diversity, and that the level below the Earth could be a womb as well as a tomb. Ultimately, he compellingly examines "how much of our existence remains in mystery, how much of reality continues to elude us, and how much deeper our world runs beyond what we know."A vivid illumination of the dark and an effective evocation of its profound mystery.

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