A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary

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Title: A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
Author: Alain de Botton
Photographer: Richard Baker
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2010
112 pages

I agree with readers who found this to be lighter than they had hoped, and also with those who found it sufficiently absorbing. De Botton provides a nicely phrased but ultimately superficial pensée on his week spent in or adjacent to Heathrow. The idea of this project is a good one, though not de Botton's--he was a recipient of the opportunity. There's nothing to dislike about the narrative, and the photos provide a additional medium that is wonderfully atmospheric.

My dirty secret is that I love airports. I regularly kill up to 12 hours at international airports. If I were to be a writer in residence at an airport (and let's be frank: Many of us have spent many days trapped in a single airport), I'd have explored aspects unexamined by de Botton, such as sleeping in the airport (not at the adjacent hotel)--at a gate, in the women's room, behind an unused counter, in a car in the parking garage--, riding a baggage cart on the tarmac, eating foods I never eat,  watching rest room traffic, or determining the feasibility of visiting the other terminals, for example. I'd want to evaluate the art, see what long-term menu variety can be constructed at the shops and restaurants, try on clothes, or see how good a haircut and massage I could get. The man is in Heathrow, where I'd assuredly sample as much Scotch as God and nature permitted, perhaps purchased by strategically flying in to Terminal 5 from a trans-border point of origin so I could stock up at the World Duty Free Arrivals Store. If I were lucky they'd have my favorite, Glenmorangie Cellar 13, a 10-year-old special bottling that until recently was only available at duty free and was not exported, and to which I am extremely partial. To sip a wee dram at Heathrow, perhaps accompanied by a "luxury chocolate" from The Chocolate Box while perusing a copy of Jackson's beautifully illustrated Whiskey (acquired at WH Smith) would be a deep and quiet pleasure with no plane to catch or security queues to endure.

Scenes of Clerical Life

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#554
Title: Scenes of Clerical Life
Author: George Eliot
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1857
431 pages

Eliot's first novel is actually three somewhat related novellas in pastoral settings and with more-or-less prominent clerics. While Eliot's promise is easy to see, this early attempt seems claustrophobic, perhaps due to its structure. The tone has the carefulness and inhibited language of many debuts, though her humor (and archness) often carry the day. The plots of the novellas are, in contrast, fairly overblown and unnecessarily dramatic. As a modern feminist reader I can't get behind Janet's forgiveness of her husband, which seems to reinscribe the woman's subservient role in the treacly way that Eliot typically reserves for offensively cute little children in subsequent novels. I am left with am impression of moral simplicity rather than the moral complexity I usually enjoy in her work. My overall impression is of wearing a corset laced just a little too tightly--I can't quite get a full, deep breath of Eliot.

Visitation in a Zen Garden

#553
Title: Visitation in a Zen Garden
Author: Karlyn M. Ward
Publisher: il piccolo editions (Fisher King Press)
Year: 2010
64 pages

A very sweet essay with photos about a skulk of foxes (yes, that's the venereal term) that begin to visit her home Zen garden. Lurking (or skulking) beneath the surface narrative is the reader's awareness that the author is a Jungian analyst and must be just bursting with pleasure over the multiple archetypes evoked by the conjunction.

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo

#552
Title: The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo
Author: Germano Almeida
Translator: Sheila Glaser
Publisher: New Directions
Year: 2004
Country: Cape Verde
152 pages

This was a fast, enjoyable book, a very funny novel whose absent protagonist leaves a will that runs to hundreds of pages. Embedded in the will and other characters' associations to it or tangents from it is the dead man's apologia pro vita sua. While sometimes he seems to be on the level, at other times there is sufficient evidence that he is engaged in image management and has spun events as best he can, perhaps even disguising his real intentions from himself.

City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments #3)

#551
Title: City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments #3)
Author: Cassandra Clare
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry
Year: 2010
541 pages

A reasonably satisfying conclusion to this trilogy. I figured out the key elements of Sebastian's backstory early on, but found how Clare got the reader there interesting. The action generally made sense and most immediate questions were answered. I appreciated some usefully disgusting scenes with angels.

Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival

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Title: Homeland: An Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival
Author: George Obama and Damien Lewis
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2010
256 pages

The autobiography, thus far, of President Obama's younger half-brother George in Kenya. The writing is fine and George's life story is interesting. What makes this fun, though, is its points of intersection and divergence with Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. The constellation formed by the brothers' stories is more complex and engaging than either read alone. Any family story is enriched by multiple perspectives, and even moreso when one is a public figure.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

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Title: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Author: John Perkins
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Year: 2004
250 pages

A sweeping, chilling assertion that governments manipulate the prospects and economies of other countries in order to control their governments. It seems to me that there isn't a lot of dispute about this, as even a cursory look at a book like Bananas!: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World attests. Neither is there any question that governments engage in covert activities that interrupt and replace local politics and societies for the economic benefit of the stronger nation, vide King Leopold's Ghost or Chief of Station, Congo, to cite a couple of dovetailing books I've read recently. What may be in question is the extent to which corporations are knowingly complicit, and the veracity of Perkins's account as a memoir. I'm less concerned with or interested in the accuracy of the purported autobiography, and more curious why there has been such widespread condemnation of the underlying, generally accepted and documented premise: Governments and their economic vassals and/or masters collaborate to put other governments in thrall to the dominant government's political and economic interests. This just isn't news. Therefore, read this with the books above and with the excellent and uncontroversial How to Lie With Statistics in order to focus your reflection on what benefits you might passively receive while your government pursues its ends in the world, and to what extent you examine or accept assertions about dictators, communists, and the like.