Subterranean Cities is arranged thematically around various forms of undergroundness in the modern city. Starting with the London Underground and the Paris Metro, Pike argues that it was the emergence of a physical underground through which ordinary people passed every day that changed the way that people imagined what lay beneath the ground. Though prior to this there were images of the underground, in particular associated with hell in one form or another, it seems to have been the use of the physical underground that ushered in the modern concept of the subterranean city for which Pike is arguing. After the underground, Pike goes on to look at catacombs and cemeteries, sewers, coal mines, and bomb shelters. Each of these spaces is discovered through an impressive array of sources, including the literary, visual, philosophical, architectural, technological, and scientific. The sources create a convincing impression of the extent to which views on the subterranean were shared in the culture into which Pike is inquiring, though in places the reader may wish Pike had attempted to offer some insight into the experience of “ordinary” people, who may not have been affected in the same way as Dickens, Zola, and other authors were.

Pike argues that there were competing visions of the nature of what lay beneath both London and Paris. For some, the subterranean represented decay, decadence, that which must be excluded from the modern city. Groups that were imagined to inhabit this version of the underground include, according to Pike, Jews, homosexuals, and other “undesirables.” For others, it was described in pastoral terms, as premodern or postapocalyptic but in either case representing something better, more natural, than the modern urban experience. For yet others, what lies beneath is what Pike terms the “inorganic underground,” dominated by technology and representing modern man's domination over nature. Other versions include the subterranean as hell, or as a repository for the dead—both in cemeteries and in the socially leveling catacombs of Paris.

The choice of the comparative method provides an effective means of highlighting changes in ways of perceiving the subterranean that a single-location study might have more difficulty in pinpointing. It is through the juxtaposition of the two cases that Pike is able to argue for the peculiarly modern way of thinking about the city and its buried elements. Using the two cases of London and Paris allows Pike to demonstrate the extent to which the underground city has shaped the urban experience. While differences between the two locations are revealed, perhaps the bigger story is the similarities: in both London and Paris, modernity seems to have brought with it new ways of perceiving and imagining what lies beneath the city, both physically and figuratively. All too often historians’ insistence on working within national boundaries blinds us to the fact that some historical phenomena happen on a wider canvas. Like histories of the Atlantic world, comparative history can give us new insights into the extent of the interrelations between regions and nations. While in places the reader can feel frustrated that the author does not make more explicit the significance of the similarities and differences he exposes, Pike's work is a welcome addition to the underdeveloped area of comparative history.

Pike's choice of period is unusual. The cultural turn, the growing emphasis on interdisciplinarity, and our increasing awareness of non-Western histories has made historians question and alter their ideas about periodization. Taking in the whole of the nineteenth century as well as both World Wars allows Pike to trace visions of the world beneath Paris and London through several important changes, including the opening of the Paris catacombs, Haussmann's alterations of the cityscape, the openings of the London Underground and later the Paris Metro, all the way to the use of the London Underground as a shelter during the Second World War. Though the title of the book suggests that the story being told ends in 1945, Pike convincingly shows us that many of the visions of the subterranean that he has identified persist in influencing our urban experience up to the present day. Though the long time period considered is both effective and challenging, it also has its slight drawbacks, in that so much breadth makes it more difficult for readers to keep track of the exact chronology, particularly as Pike moves both between periods of time and themes and between London and Paris.

David L. Pike's book is impressive and exciting, a work of great scope and breadth, drawing on a wide range of sources. This book is both comparative and interdisciplinary, and it will be of interest to those working in history, literature, visual culture, and cultural geography. Both the use of the comparative method and the long time period (1800–1945 and beyond) studied allow the author to demonstrate aspects of cultural change—change in both the experienced and the imagined city—which more traditional histories of single nations and more curtailed chronologies might easily overlook. Pike's book is timely, making a significant contribution to current debates about modernity and the urban experience, as well as to the growing interest in the “spatial turn.” By looking beyond both national and discipline boundaries, Pike shows that urban modernity was experienced, at least in part, in terms of what he calls the “vertical city.”