Bunker

Building for the End Times

Bradley Garrett

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501188565
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501188572
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

As seen on 60 Minutes, a thought-provoking, chilling, and eerily prescient look at "prepper" communities around the world that are building bunkers against a possible apocalypse. Currently, 3.7 million Americans call themselves preppers. Millions more prep without knowing it. Bradley Garrett, who began writing this book years before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, argues that prepping is a rational response to global, social, and political systems that are failing to produce credible narratives of continued stability. Left with a sense of foreboding fueled by disease outbreaks, increasing government dysfunctionality, eroding critical infrastructure, nuclear brinksmanship, and an accelerating climate crisis, people all over the world are responding predictably—by hunkering down.Garrett traveled across four continents to meet those who are constructing panic rooms, building underground backyard survival chambers, stockpiling supplies, preparing go bags, hiding inflatable rafts, rigging mobile "bugout" vehicles, and burrowing deep into the earth. He has returned with "a big-thinking, deep-diving, page-turning study of fear, privilege, and apocalypse" (Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland ) from the frontlines of the way we live now: an illuminating reflection on our age of disquiet and dread that brings our times into new and sharper focus.With scenes that are "fascinating, amusing, crazy, chilling, and surreally topical" (Douglas Preston, author of Lost City of the Monkey God ), Garrett shows that the bunker is all around us: in malls, airports, gated communities, the vehicles we drive. Most of all, he reveals, it's in our minds.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Author’s Note
• Acronym and Argot Glossary
• Introduction: Private Arks of the Underground
• Chapter 1: The Dread Merchants: Selling Safe Space
• Chapter 2: Geological Deterrence: Prepping Like a State
• Chapter 3: Living with the Bomb: A Cultural History of Prepping
• Chapter 4: Pipes in the Ground: Burying Secret Spaces
• Chapter 5: Texas Redoubt: Tribulation in Style
• Chapter 6: Preps Down Under: Bugging Out of Cities
• Chapter 7: Escape from California: Boltholes at the Bottom of the World
• Chapter 8: Sustainable Security: Thailand’s Eco-Fortress
• Chapter 9: Captain Paranoid: Fortitude Ranch
• Chapter 10: The Antibunker: Bloom Where You’re Planted
• Chapter 11: Community Nourishment: Utah’s Mormon Citadel
• Chapter 12: PrepperCon: The Business of Survival
• Chapter 13: Rolling Territory: The Mobile Bunker
• Chapter 14: Life in a Geoscraper: The Survival Condo
• Chapter 15: The Concrete Cave: Vivos Indiana
• Conclusion: The Last Plan
• Coda: Stalking the Apocalypse at Chernobyl
• Afterword: What It Takes to Survive the Apocalypse
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright