“A Week at the Airport”
By Alain de Botton
Vintage
Released: Sept. 21

For most of us, the airport is a necessary evil. A gateway to better things. A holding pattern until we’re at the place we really want to be.

Anyone who’s felt the soul-sucking facelessness of a major airport for any length of time (and especially those who’ve been subject to flight delays or the indescribably awful status of standby) likely wouldn’t be too keen on the idea of spending an entire week there.

Alain de Botton is not like most of us in this regard. In the first sentences of his humorous, casually observed “A Week at the Airport,” he admits that he has often wished for his flight to experience a delay in order to be forced to spend more time within an airport’s confines.

Thus his assignment here — charged by British Airways to spend a week in Heathrow as the airline’s writer-in residence — produces a perspective not tainted by the weary eyes of travel. For de Botton, the airport and its surrounding areas (the airport hotel, the runways) have something to say about the human condition.

Profundity is not the goal of the slim tome, which barely exceeds 100 pages. Rather, de Botton succeeds at deriving gentle observations about humanity, the nature of travel and the mass-produced culture of the airport that nonetheless is not devoid of charm to the author.

Whimsically illustrated with matter-of-fact photographs from Richard Baker, “A Week at the Airport” might not make the reader eager to wait in a security line or endure the molded plastic of a waiting area seat, but it does reveal curious beauty in a manufactured world.

— Dusty Somers, journalism senior