Airportness

An enchanting, meditative journey through the cultures and ecologies of contemporary flight. Airportness unsettles places and processes that are often taken for granted, drawing us out into the simultaneously fascinating and disturbing webs of earthly possibility that are tangled up in the world-forming creature we call an airport. Thom van Dooren, Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of New South Wales, Australia, and author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction Airportness is an insightful, witty guide to the ecologies of Earth's strange new habitat. A Thoreau not of Concord, but of the concourse, Schaberg writes with boundless curiosity for the many layers of meaning and contradiction within the physical and mental space of airports David George Haskell, Professor of Biology, University of the South, USA, and author of The Songs of Trees and Pulitzer finalist The Forest Unseen With deep insight and a singular brilliance, Christopher Schaberg takes the reader on a journey from curb to curb, chastising us for our indifference to cloudscapes, rekindling our wonder for liftoff, asking us to reckon with airport as metaphor for late-stage capitalism, for American identity, for the last vestiges of faith, even, ironically, for what we call home. Part razor-sharp critique, part advanced elegy for a doomed mode of transportation, Airportness is finally a declaration of love for a threatened land(sky)scape, an imperative to remain awake and alive. Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted