Survival City

Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America

By: Tom Vanderbilt

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Paperback | 15 April 2010 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
240 Pages

Age
13+

Grade
8+

Dimensions(cm)
2.41 x 1.48 x 0.14

Paperback

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On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time when we all lived at ground zero. In this road trip among ruined missile silos, atomic storage bunkers, and secret test sites, a lost battleground emerges amid the architecture of the 1950s, accompanied by Walter Cotten’s stunning photographs. Survival City looks deep into the national soul, unearthing the dreams and fears that drove us during the latter half of the twentieth century.

“A crucial and dazzling book, masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating.”—Dave Eggers

“A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because [Vanderbilt] is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader.”—Los Angeles Times

“A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life.”—Greil Marcus, Bookforum

Industry Reviews

"A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because Vanderbilt is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader." - Los Angeles Times "A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life." - Greil Marcus, Bookforum "A fascinating political and cultural analysis of 'cold war architecture': a vast array of structures from missile silos to small towns built to test the effectiveness of an atomic blast, presidential fallout shelters, nuclear waste dumps, monoliths like the windowless PacBell building in Los Angeles, and countless motels and diners named 'Atomic.'" - Publishers Weekly "Exploring buried traces of the cold war in America... Vanderbilt finds a vast, secret, and now largely abandoned landscape." - Architecture "Survival City, by taking us on a tour of important places we've probably never seen, is both a call to preserve cold war history and a valuable reminder of the continual impact of nuclear weapons on the American cultural and physical landscape." - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists "This is a crucial and dazzling book. Masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating. It reminds us of the absurd and sinister ways humans have attempted to ensure their survival, and, without ever oversimplifying, it manages to be a ridiculously entertaining read." - Dave Eggers.

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