Why did I love this book?
Part travelogue, part natural history, this book about the hidden worlds beneath our feet – caves, mines, tunnels, root systems – enticed me into thinking in radically different ways about the natural world and about our planet.
It is written in a lyrical style, often elevating itself to a high form of prose poetry.
One is left with a deep sense of awe with respect to nature and Macfarlane’s supreme mastery of the English language.
8 authors picked Underland as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth's underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time-from prehistoric art in Norwegian sea caves, to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, to a deep-sunk "hiding place" where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come-Underland takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind.
Global in its geography and written with great lyricism, Underland speaks powerfully to our present…