From the bestselling author of The Art of Travel comes a wittily intriguing exploration of the strange "non-place" that he believes is the imaginative center of our civilization.
Given unprecedented access to one of the worldβs busiest airports as a βwriter-in-residence,β Alain de Botton found it to be a showcase for many of the major crosscurrents of the modern worldβfrom our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our global interconnectedness to our romanticizing of the exotic. He met travelers from all over and spoke with everyone from baggage handlers to pilots to the airport chaplain. Weaving together these conversations and his own observationsβof everything from the poetry of room service menus to the eerie silence in the middle of the runway at midnightβde Botton has produced an extraordinary meditation on a place that most of us never slow down enough to see clearly. Lavishly illustrated in color by renowned photographer Richard Baker, A Week at the Airport reveals the airport in all its turbulence and soullessness andβyesβeven beauty.
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