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A review by sherif
The End of Airports by Christopher Schaberg
2.0
I love airports and I love aviation. This is not a good book for you if that's what you're here for. This is a good book for you if you are interested in literary analysis and metaphor when focused on one topic, where the topic in this case just happens to be airports.
There is some discussion about the author's job at an airport back in the day, the waning of airports as a place for exciting travel and leisure, and the fact that they've become ordinary and tiring places almost no one feels good about being at anymore. There is also some nostalgia about aircraft models that seemed new one day only to be retired and replaced by new ones that feel new until they also get retired.
There is some discussion about that. Unfortunately it's buried under too much forced literary references and opaque and mysterious language that sometimes just doesn't mean anything. Anything can mean anything of course, if you squint hard enough. But at some point, the squinting is you imbuing the statement with whatever meaning you have in mind, and it becomes very hard for you to know what the statement actually means, if the author actually meant something at all by it. If you're into that kind of thing, then this book might be for you. If you're looking for genuine, insightful, and straight to the point discussion of the history and future of airports, this will be disappointing.
See the spoiler tag for quotes/examples of statements you'll find in the book.
Each page has a statement at the bottom, intended by the author to motivate rumination and meditation on the meaning of it. Examples:
"Airports are at once necessary and impossible."
"Airports seemed to us at first only enigmatic transition zones for definite physical acts."
Here is a quote I find representative of the nature of the book:
"Reading about this incident, among conjectures and speculations about what caused the structural failure, I was struck by a particular comment: reader OrlandoPBM quipped, 'These jet bridges sometimes have a life of their own.' What could this possibly mean? Certainly the author of this comment did not mean it literally – and yet, there is a mystery worth tarrying with here, a specter of autonomy and agency.
What if we were to take this curious insight seriously: that each jet bridge has a life of its own?..."
I do not think there is a mystery worth tarrying with here.
I did choose strong examples of the literary and verbose nature of the writing. My point is to demonstrate that this book is aimed towards readers more interested in literary analysis and references rather than readers purely interested in the history and nerdy details of aviation.
Even when it comes to the literature angle, many of the metaphors the author draws between airports and "life" don't seem that unique to airports.
There is some discussion about the author's job at an airport back in the day, the waning of airports as a place for exciting travel and leisure, and the fact that they've become ordinary and tiring places almost no one feels good about being at anymore. There is also some nostalgia about aircraft models that seemed new one day only to be retired and replaced by new ones that feel new until they also get retired.
There is some discussion about that. Unfortunately it's buried under too much forced literary references and opaque and mysterious language that sometimes just doesn't mean anything. Anything can mean anything of course, if you squint hard enough. But at some point, the squinting is you imbuing the statement with whatever meaning you have in mind, and it becomes very hard for you to know what the statement actually means, if the author actually meant something at all by it. If you're into that kind of thing, then this book might be for you. If you're looking for genuine, insightful, and straight to the point discussion of the history and future of airports, this will be disappointing.
See the spoiler tag for quotes/examples of statements you'll find in the book.
Each page has a statement at the bottom, intended by the author to motivate rumination and meditation on the meaning of it. Examples:
"Airports are at once necessary and impossible."
"Airports seemed to us at first only enigmatic transition zones for definite physical acts."
Here is a quote I find representative of the nature of the book:
"Reading about this incident, among conjectures and speculations about what caused the structural failure, I was struck by a particular comment: reader OrlandoPBM quipped, 'These jet bridges sometimes have a life of their own.' What could this possibly mean? Certainly the author of this comment did not mean it literally – and yet, there is a mystery worth tarrying with here, a specter of autonomy and agency.
What if we were to take this curious insight seriously: that each jet bridge has a life of its own?..."
I do not think there is a mystery worth tarrying with here.
I did choose strong examples of the literary and verbose nature of the writing. My point is to demonstrate that this book is aimed towards readers more interested in literary analysis and references rather than readers purely interested in the history and nerdy details of aviation.
Even when it comes to the literature angle, many of the metaphors the author draws between airports and "life" don't seem that unique to airports.