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Explorer and geographer Alastair Bonnett takes us on a thought-provoking tour of the world’s most fascinating islands, featuring hand-drawn maps, color photos, and stories from his travels.

There are millions of islands on our planet. New islands are being built at an unprecedented rate, for tourism and territorial ambition. Many are also disappearing, besieged by rising sea levels. The story of our world’s islands is one of the great dramas of our time, and it is playing out around the planet—islands are sprouting or being submerged everywhere from the South China Sea to the Atlantic. Elsewhere is the story of this strange and mesmerizing planetary spectacle.
 
In this book, explorer and geographer Alastair Bonnett takes us on a thought-provoking tour of the world’s most fascinating islands. He traveled the globe to provide a firsthand look at numerous islands, sketching a vivid likeness of each one he visited. From a “crannog,” an ancient artificial island in a Scottish loch, to the militarized artificial islands China is building; from the disappearing islands that remain the home of native Central Americans to the ritzy new islands of Dubai; from Hong Kong to the Isles of Scilly—all have compelling stories to tell. As we journey around the world with Bonnett, he addresses urgent contemporary issues such as climate change, economic inequality, and the changing balance of world power as reflected in the fates of islands. Along the way, we also learn about the many ways islands rise and fall, the long and little-known history of human island-building and the prospect that the inland hills and valleys will one day be archipelagos.
 
Featuring Bonnett’s charming hand-drawn maps and 33 full-color photos, Elsewhere is a captivating travel book for any armchair adventurer.

Elsewhere argues that you can make all of the “smart” food choices you want and follow Michael Pollan to the letter, but that won’t end the violence in the food system. Eating is an act of violence. With every life-sustaining meal and food purchase, we shorten the lives of farmers, laborers, animals, the planet, and ourselves. This isn’t a symptom of a broken food system, but a feature of a working one: our capitalist food system doesn’t cause harm accidentally, it does so because it has to. To keep generating wealth, the system moves its violence around, away from privileged producers and consumers and into forgettable elsewheres: reservations, prisons, distant islands, killing floors, inner cities, rural hinterlands, and war-torn countries. 

     This shell-game is not new. Elsewhere examines the 250-year history of the US food system to uncover how the country used abundance to enrich some and exploit others; how it captured, colonized, and reorganized territory to conceal its harms; and why decades of technological innovation, environmental awareness, and consumer consciousness haven’t staunched these self-inflicted wounds. Elsewhere invites us to ask different questions about the food system: where does its violence come from, where does it go, and how can we nurture a food system that first does no harm.

"The Elsewhere." Or, midbar-biblical Hebrew for both "wilderness" and "speech." A place of possession and dispossession, loss and nostalgia. But also a place that speaks. Ingeniously using a Talmudic interpretive formula about the disposition of boundaries, Newton explores narratives of "place, flight, border, and beyond." The writers of The Elsewhere are a disparate company of twentieth-century memoirists and fabulists from the Levant (Palestine/Israel, Egypt) and East Central Europe. Together, their texts-cunningly paired so as to speak to one another in mutually revelatory ways-narrate the paradox of the "near distance."