Jennifer Toth in Mole People; Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City Chicago Review Press, 1993, p. 170, goes on to talk about our fear of the underground.
I think we all feel it. I know I do when I think about taking the subway up to north Philadelphia at night. It's not a place we're used to. Everyone is a transient. We feel alienated there. Cell phones don't work down there. It's dirty, often smelly if people have urinated there. We don't want to live down there and wonder about the people who do. It's dark, hard to see. There aren't very many crowds at night. People seem stiff and uncomfortable. There is limited access, and where there's limited access, there's limited egress. There may be a person taking money, but he or she's separated from the crowd by a glass window.
It wasn't always so, she says, on p. 170. Drawing from the work of Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground; An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: the MIT Press, 1984), she writes,
Historian Rosalind Williams explains that subterranean iconography is based on historical and literary interpretations of underworlds as technological environments. Fear of the underground emerged historically, at the same time as fear of technological progress.I'm not familiar with this work. I think I'm going to search for it.
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Ian Kearney, the director of the Kearney Music School, an elite musical training school in Philadelphia, dies after a fall from a balcony during a recital. World-famous cellist, Henry Harrier, recently forced from the faculty, returns to investigate Ian's death when his prized former student is arrested. Henry shows through his brilliant and single-minded pursuit of the truth that, as usual, they have it all wrong. This Sherlock Holmes-type mystery leads the reader through the world of classical music and lays bare the conflicts which dominate the lives of talented adolescents when placed under the pressure of studying for a demanding, stressful, and often elusive career as a classical music performer. Henry Harrier is part John Le Carre's George Smiley, part Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes, and part Orlando Cole the beloved teacher, renowned chamber musician, and until his own retirement, the premier cellist of the Curtis Institute.
Tim was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1946. In 1951 he moved with his family to Schenectady, New York, where he lived through high school. He attended Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio, from 1964 to 1968. He graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in history and philosophy. He received his Ph. D. in history in U.S. history in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison after spending 2.5 years in the U. S. Army. Most of his army service was completed in Wuerzburg, Germany, from 1969-1971. In 1972 he returned to Madison to complete his doctoral study. His dissertation, Those Who Moved; Internal Migrants in American 1607-1840, combined the statistical analysis of genealogical and biographical data with the study of traditional literary diaries, letters, and journals.
