Underground
A Human History of the World Beneath Our Feet
Spiegel & Grau, July 2018
Will is a writer with an obsession. Since his teenage years, when he explored an abandoned railroad tunnel that ran beneath his home in Providence, RI, Will has been in thrall to the unseen world below. Now twenty-eight years old, he has traveled – under fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation – to study underground spaces in fifteen countries – from the catacombs and sewers of Paris and a secret tunnel beneath the Kremlin, to Mayan caves in Belize, pre-historic art sites in France, and ancient, underground dwellings in Cappadocia. In Naples, he helped to map an all-but-unknown network of cisterns beneath the streets, built in classical Greek times.
UNDERGROUND is the story of our relationship to subterranean space. It seeks to understand why the underground has such an enduring hold on the human imagination. Why has it inspired such profound worship, obsession and paranoia? Why do we believe it holds sacred truths? The story opens in the deepest past, with a group of scientists two miles underground discovering billion-year-old microbial worms that may be the earliest forms of life. It concludes far into the future, with a team of philosophers building a monument on top of a subterranean nuclear waste depository in order to deter later generations of archaeologists from ever digging there.
Each chapter explores a different aspect of our relationship to the underground: ways it has enchanted or repulsed, inspired or unnerved us. The chapters blend the author’s own experiences with those of people who work, study or have explored before him. The cast includes spelunkers, graffiti artists, miners, photographers, poets, archaeologists, Medieval vigilantes, cartographers, urban explorers, geologists, sewer workers, Victorian tourists, tomb guardians, paleontologists and neuroscientists. Some are well-known to history, others obscure. In all of their stories, the echoes of the past can be heard in the present.
It is an impressionistic history rather than comprehensive: a blend of historical narrative, memoir, profile, popular science, mythology, scholarship, reportage, anecdote, narrative portraiture, biography, philosophy and old-fashioned story-telling