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  • Endless Caverns: An Underground Journey into the Show Caves of Appalachia by Douglas Reichert Powell
  • María Alejandra Pérez
Endless Caverns: An Underground Journey into the Show Caves of Appalachia. By Douglas Reichert Powell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 218.)

Spoiler alert. On page 201 of Douglas Reichert Powell’s Endless Caverns (2018), there is a photograph of a Walmart built on a strip mine bench in Logan County, West Virginia. The photo (by photojournalist Earl Dotter) is stunning. Such landscape, a perfect illustration of what anthropologist Marc [End Page 108] Augé would call “non-places,” is a dramatic contrast to show caves. Reichert Powell tells us: “Appalachia is a region whose identity as a place, real and imagined, is undergoing profoundly dislocating experiences with all kinds of manifestations of the global economy, whether strip mines, golf courses, private prisons, or Supercenters” (201). But fortunately, we have show caves, the antitheses of these non-places: “the show cave by its very nature aspires to the exact opposite of the Walmart of the strip mine. Show caves are some of the most placeful places you could ever hope to find” (201). And by the time we read this, on this point we are thoroughly convinced.

Reichert Powell is an engaging and often hilarious writer with a passion for show caves and all of the people that make them possible. He is a meticulous historian, an acute and often daring ethnographer, but most of all an audacious and creative storyteller who weaves the always intricate and surprising histories of these places, which “while tacky and garish, are really and truly wondrous” (8). The book’s nine chapters follow the structure of a show-cave tour, starting with the introduction to the “Big Room” (Chapter 1), through the “Hall of Illusions” (Chapter 3), and that quintessential show-cave experience, the “Total Darkness Demonstration” (Chapter 5). Then there are the unexpected surprises that make particular show caves, well, particular. In this case, it’s a chapter (Chapter 7) on the women and men behind the curtain (or backlighting the cave bacon?), members of the National Cave Association who gather at national conventions to talk shop and network. This all takes places in a particular region, the Great Appalachia Valley, where the author lived and then returned to do several years of research visiting its thirty-six show caves, whether open for business or not. This book is perfect to introduce undergraduates to these topics, whether in English, history, anthropology, geography, or even environmental studies programs.

Often the story of a show cave is a novel entry point into local and regional histories, sometimes tragic. Caves and the lands they are in are often sites of forced removal and even massacres of Native Americans who inhabited and worked this land prior to the arrival of European colonizers. The workings of white supremacy make their mark in these hidden spaces as well. Take, for example, Mystic Cave near Chattanooga, which has it all: prehistoric habitation, Civil War graffiti of the War of 1812, forced Cherokee removal in 1837, and a series of efforts to commercialize the cave. But by the time of Reichert Powell’s visit, it is closed. Yet he presses on: “the spelunker in me just couldn’t resist the lure of getting in a closed cave” (179). There is a place for nonhuman beings in the stories of show caves as well. We learn of the potential link between show caves and white-nose syndrome, caused by a fungus that has devastated bat populations in the east, with catastrophic ecological effects. [End Page 109]

The timing of Endless Caverns’s publication coincides with a rise in interest among geographers, anthropologists, and historians in the vertical and volumetric qualities of space (see for example, S. Elden’s 2013 article “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power” in Political Geography and/or A. Kinchy, R. Phadke, and J. M. Smith’s 2018 article “Engaging the Underground: An STS Field in Formation” in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society). This includes, of course, the subterranean. Much of the recent literature on this topic, however, has focused on...

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