OFF THE MAP|/UNRULY PLACES IN THE US

This is arm-chair travelling with the excuse that many of the spots covered are so remote or so dangerous that you would have to be very lucky to visit them. In fact, you are unlikely to find them on any map, at all.

The places covered in this book are distinctly un-get-at-able, often dangerous, sometimes transitory and you would not want to book your holiday to the likes of Eyl, the pirate capital of Somalia, or Krasnoyarsk-26, a scret town in Russia dedicated to the production of plutonium. A visit to New Moore is best kept brief: the island which only emerged in the Bay of Bengal after a cyclone in 1970 is frequently submerged by the sea.

Alastair Bonnett is Professor of Social Geography at Newcastle University. Previous books include What is Geography? (Sage, 2008) and How to Argue (Pearson, 2001). He has also contributed to history and current affairs magazines on a wide variety of topics, such as world population and radical nostalgia. Alastair was editor of the avant-garde, psychogeographical, magazine Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration between 1994-2000. He was also involved for many years in situationist and anarchist politics. His latest research projects are about memories of the city and themes of loss and yearning in modern politics.