Book cover for Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World by Trevor Paglen

Blank Spots on the Map

The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World

2009 Released
352 Pages
6-7 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
BerkleyISBN 9781101011492

Welcome to a top-level clearance world that doesn't exist...Now with updated material for the paperback edition.

This is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a road trip through a shadow nation of state secrets, clandestine military bases, black sites, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies that make up what insiders call the "black world."

Here, geographer and provocateur Trevor Paglen knocks on the doors of CIA prisons, stakes out a covert air base in Nevada from a mountaintop 30 miles away, dissects the Defense Department's multibillion dollar "black" budget, and interviews those who live on the edges of these blank spots.

Whether Paglen reports from a hotel room in Vegas, a secret prison in Kabul, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, he is impassioned, rigorous, relentless-and delivers eye-opening details.

Trevor Paglen

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Fondazione Prada, Milan; and the Barbican Centre, London. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Artforum, and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award and, in 2016, he won the Deutsche B�rse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.

More by Trevor Paglen

Why Readwise Books?

Readwise Books is an ebook & audiobook platform that automatically logs how much you and your friends read, making it fun and easy to read more. Learn more →