Book Review: Secrets Underground

Book: Secrets Underground: North America's Buried Past by Elizabeth MacLeod

Source: Borrowed from Publisher/NetGalley

Publication: Available now

Description:

"Uncover the spine-tingling mysteries and eerie surprises that lurk right under your feet!"

In "Secrets Underground," history buff Elizabeth MacLeod takes readers deep down, down, down below the earth's surface, and introduces them to a completely different world -- sometimes terrifying, often baffling, and always fascinating.

Discover: the Civil War secrets carefully concealed in Organ Cave, West Virginia the top-secret equipment that lies deep below Grand Central Terminal in New York City the network of tunnels in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, that once hid victims of persecution -- and illegal liquor transported by notorious Chicago gangsters how the Aztec city Tenochtitlan, the largest and most powerful city of its time in what is now North America, nearly disappeared without a trace the abandoned ships buried beneath San Francisco that reveal the city's history as a top destination for fortune seekers during the Gold Rush the nuclear shelter the U.S. government kept hidden for decades underneath an exclusive resort in West Virginia called The Greenbrier.

Guiding readers through these fascinating places, MacLeod reveals their long-kept secrets and deftly explains how these lost and hidden subterranean passages, spaces, and caves answer decades-old puzzles, help us understand our own past, and lead us to discover what life was really like in eras gone by.


Rating: 3 stars

Review:

Informative? Yes. Interesting to read? Yes and No.

I found some of the information in this six chapter book to be really interesting but since I'm not really the target market for this book I wonder how it will keep young readers motivated to read it. The first two chapters I thought were the most interesting and exciting while the others fell short with being dull and boring. Although the other chapters may not have be the most engaging there were various sections that were.

I like that the book provides a lot of historical information (such as some parts of San Francisco is built over abandon ships, isn't that an interesting fact), I just wish the book was more exciting but that's a completely different issue altogether. Because it's so rare to find a history book that's not boring.

This book is a good read for the history and I would recommend it to young readers who are total history buff. Secrets Underground would give them quite a bit of information to read through. Reading this I can tell that the author enjoyed doing research for this and finding out information about that has been forgotten over the years.