A Week At The Airport: Book Review

Finished reading A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton. At first I wanted to write about how awful this book was, about how the writer had no focus, and about how he violated basic writing principles such as switching point of view in the middle of a paragraph, and about how he just really put together a hodge-podge of writing into a 63 page book. But as I reflected on this book it occurred to me just how much of a social scientist I had become... I was attracted to this book because I hoped it would be a detailed ethnography about the aspects of airports that we don't see as travellers. I hoped for enlightenment and understanding about the "secrets" of airports behind the scenes. Instead, the author wandered about for a week with little focus or purpose and the result was a thin description of airport life behind the scenes. This would make for a great doctoral dissertation-- or the very least, a great research project conducted as an ethnography!!!