Abstract

REVIEWS 89 Networked Remembrance: Excavating Buried Memories in the Railways Beneath London and Berlin,BySAMUEL MERRILL. Pp. 405, 30 illustrations. Bern: Peter Lang, 2017. $50.87. ISBN 978-3-0343-1919-5. Paperback. In Networked Remembrance, Sam Merrill explores in detail the production of social memory in what has so far been an underexplored terrain in memory studies, the underground trans- port networks. In a densely written, engaging and cleverly structured book, Merrill descends into the London Underground and Berlin Untergrundbahn (U-Bahn) and Stadtschnellbahn (S-Bahn) to offer an empirically rich take on the ways in which these two undergrounds become part of urban remembering (and forgetting). In the empirical chapters, we are pre- sented with cases from London and Berlin that speak to how memory and the underground become interlinked symbolically and experientially. The book however does not offer a com- parative perspective in a traditional sense. Rather than offering sequential comparisons of similar cases from both transportation networks, Merrill uses cases from one to interrogate the other in a series of in-depth explorations as well as lightened reflections. Such a way of referring back and forth between the two underground landscapes allows Merrill to acknowl- edge and also make use of the complexity of