We just received this fantastic review for The
Textual Life of Airports from the journal Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment. Here is an excerpt from it:
His astute and idiosyncratic analysis
ranges from boys' detective fiction and the sort of popular novel that sells well at airport
bookstores (which passengers consume so voraciously at the gate and in the air)
to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Don DeLillo; to newspaper articles, popular songs,
and cartoons related to airports; to texts and signage related to security that
mediate the charged tedium of so much time spent waiting at airports; to the
vernacular of behind-the-scenes airport workers; to the literature and
discourse about September 11, which brought home the great risks and costs that
we had overlooked in our practical reliance on commercial flight… By the end,
this reader was convinced that, as Schaberg contends, “airports have been
situated as the place to read in contemporary culture,” and that they are not
at all the “non-places” they seem (the term is anthropologist Marc Augé's), but
rich sites for the study of supermodernity's impact on place and region (2, 1).
We are getting quite excited for the
paperback publishing in the Spring. Find out more information about it here