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Atlas Obscura
Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton (Workman Publishing) £25.00
In Antarctica, a gleaming bust of Vladimir Lenin surveys the frozen wastes. Left by pioneering communists determined to reach the inaccessible South Pole (as opposed to the geographical pole) it is a monument to communism that has outlasted it. It’s one of the many weird and wonderful entries in the Atlas Obscura, a book that will bewilder and mesmerise you with the world’s obscurest riches. Derived from a kind of Wikipedia for people who
want to keep up with the Indiana Joneses, the Atlas Obscura documents some of the strangest places, weirdest objects and disturbing phenomena the world has to offer. Though it is in the spirit of the website (which has 3.3 million visitors a month) it’s not a copy and paste job – the team behind the site rewrote the entries for publication and included some places that aren’t on the website. Broken down by country and region with a handy
map at the beginning of each chapter, each entry has brief directions and GPS coordinates should you decide to visit. But be warned: this isn’t a bucket-list kind of book – visiting some of these places could cause you to kick the bucket. In its pages you’ll find ghost towns beside the Salton Sea – accidental and once-thriving seaside resorts in the southern Californian desert; almost deserted mining towns like Uranium City; cathedrals constructed
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from rubbish in Madrid; churches made out of living trees; and a graveyard hanging down a cliff face. Macabre oddities like the Rat King (a nest of rats whose tails have become irrevocably entangled) and flayed corpses are perhaps to be expected in a book like this (though no less disturbing for all that), but every page contains wonders. Some of the oddities date back centuries, like the walled city of skyscrapers built from mud in Yemen in the 1530s, some millennia, like the skeletons of the victims of an epic hailstorm in south east Asia in 8 BCE. Others, like the Tesla coil sculpture ‘Electrum’ which spews 3 million volts into the night sky, are a product of our own mad century. It’s gratifying to see both Eden and the Lost Gardens
of Heligan get honourable mentions in the section on Great Britain and Ireland, and the 19th-century leech-powered weather station known as ‘The Tempest Prognosticator’ in Devon sounds like a must-see, but with only 28 UK entries, it’s clear that the print form of the Atlas Obscura is only scratching the surface of our national weirdness, and the same is probably true of the other sections. This is not a criticism – after all there is still a website for those with an insatiable curiosity – it’s actually strangely reassuring to find so many marvels left to discover. Rob Lowe
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