If you were to travel to the Amazon, say, or the source of the Nile, you would likely find the people there wearing corporate logo-branded T-shirts and listening to the latest pop hits on the radio. Using a GPS device or satellite photos, you can track your location just about anywhere on the face of the planet. Given globalism and the ease of travel to once-remote places, where is a would-be flag-planting adventurer to go these days?

The answer, writes Michael Ray Taylor in this intriguing book, is inward: inside the earth by way of the millions of caves that pierce its surface. Following an international team of fellow cavers--men and women in peak physical form and apparently without fear--his narrative takes us deep within the ice caves of Greenland; a vast underground labyrinth of rivers and chambers in Mexico's Yucatan; a cave on a cliff wall overlooking the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon, one that no human had ever before entered; and other great caverns of North America. High-quality (and sometimes astounding) full-color images accompany the text, offering views that usher us into a world of blind snakes, bats, strange geological formations, and uncanny sights that few surface-dwellers have been privileged to see.

Caving is not merely adventure for its own sake, Taylor notes. "Over the past decade," he observes, "scientists have been surprised to learn that in the deepest recesses of the Earth are repositories of exotic microbes ... far more varied in types of species and their individual strategies for survival than all the plants of an equatorial rain forest." Some of these microbes, he suggests, may deliver chemicals for fighting disease; they also deliver important evidence about the history of life on the planet.

But, all that said, caving offers plenty of thrills, and Taylor's book does a superb job of capturing both the science and the adventure of a journey to the center of the earth. --Gregory McNamee


From Booklist
This visually rich work was produced in conjunction with a National Geographic IMAX project filming spelunkers exploring caves throughout the world. The film follows two female cavers in subterranean sites in Greenland, the Yucatan, and the south-central U.S. The photographs and the story of the explorations would be sufficient to recommend this work, but it also includes fascinating background material on the history of the caves, their biological diversity, the tools used by spelunkers in their explorations, and the geologic forces that have made caves into natural works of art. The sites for this work were obviously, and successfully, chosen because of their visual impact and variety: a giant glacial ice cavern, vast networks of underground rivers, and cramped passageways of dripping delicate crystals. Perhaps the most astounding feature that the book highlights is not the geology but the amazing range of life-forms that prosper in impossibly harsh conditions. Eric Robbins
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From Greenland's ice grottoes to the "blue holes" of the Yucatan Peninsula and the limestone chambers of America's prime caving country, a select group of bold pioneers are charting our planet's last frontier, a strange subterranean realm of unexplored depths, unexpected wonders, and exotic life forms.

This unique, stunningly illustrated book, a companion volume to the McGillivray Freeman IMAX® theater film, takes readers on a fascinating expedition into the unkown, guiding us to the heart of a glacier, through the twisting passages of Earth's longest underwater caves, and into the caverns that wind beneath Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, where brave men and women risk their lives to open up a vast, mysterious underworld that we have barely begun to explore.

An enthralling blend of hard-core adventure and cutting-edge science, Caves leads us into the breathtaking labyrinth that lies far beneath our feet -- and reveals the long-hidden marvels awaiting the adventurous spirits who dare to seek out Earth's deepest secrets.

FROM THE CRITICS

Mary Wiltenburg - The Christian Science Monitor

"The skin of the world hides many caves," writes Michael Taylor. "Caves are to a surface landscape as veins and capillaries are to a human face - the hidden structure."

Taylor's new book, Caves: Exploring Hidden Realms, was written in conjunction with a soon-to-be-released IMAX film about earth's deepest secret places. Both the book and film follow two experienced cavers, Hazel Barton and Nancy Aulenbach, as they explore the world's most stunning internal landscapes.

Caves features over 200 pages of eerie and lovely photographs that may tempt armchair enthusiasts to abandon their day jobs for holes in the ground. Even readers who tense up near storm drains and rabbit holes will find that the book beautifully illustrates thrills they'll be just as happy to pass by.

Either way, Caves isn't just a splashy coffee-table book. In the text, Taylor interweaves stories of long-ago caving expeditions with the discoveries of his modern-day subjects.

Explorer Peter Freuchen had to regularly defrost his whiskers on a 1910 expedition to Greenland. Caver Nancy Aulenbach's husband proposed to her as they hung suspended, side by side, over a 180-foot pit called "Neversink." In Taylor's hands, these scenes are part of the same story: explorers who, time out of mind, have been drawn underground.

Taylor also marshals scientific evidence to argue that caves are historical and environmental treasures that deserve to be taken seriously - not contaminated with electric lighting, hotdog vendors, and gift shops. Twenty-five percent of the US's fresh water is stored in subterranean caves - along with bacterial and geological evidence that may revolutionize the way scientists understand our planet's past.

In the book's introduction, Ronal Kerbo, senior cave specialist of the US National Parks Service, writes, "I have heard the drumming of my heart while surrounded by solid stone.... I have felt the pull of the darkness from the lip of a great open pit beneath the earth, and wondered just for a moment why there are people who will never take the first step - from which all great journeys begin."