The author spends a week at London's Heathrow Airport, on a tab paid for by the company that owns the facility.

The first chapter sets out the conditions of the visit and explains that he was given comfortable accommodations, a meal allowance, and the run of the airport in exchange for his writing. As such it's a comfortable account of the place where nothing really goes wrong for him, and not the interminable journey that most people would experience if they were cooped up waiting in long lines for ever-delayed flights.

Detailed record of this newspaper is available at

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn97063370/

The Berlin Wall has a featured role in this 1987 film about a fallen angel (Bruno Ganz), his mentor (the late Peter Falk), and the circus performer he falls in love with (Solveig Dommartin). Terrific music from Nick Cave adds to the pre-unificiation of Germany Cold War atmosphere.

A view of the changing Detroit urban landscape from 1863 to 1962, featuring the transportation networks, their growth and change.

Even if you don't have a fascination with interurban rail systems, this is a very good book for getting a glimpse of how the streets and roadways of Detroit looked before the freeway system was put in.

p. 206 has a brief interview with Louis Borders, founder of the Borders book chain, after his adventure at Webvan (where it says he lost $1.3 billion and cashed out only $2.7 million before the end).

The structure of the book is about 55 short 6-page chapters, each with a story about how they made a major life and career shift and came out (for the most part) better for it. No index, so it's hard to leaf through it and cherry pick out the good parts; easy to pick up, read a few sample chapters at random, and pick up something.

It would be a good mid-life crisis book to buy in an airport bookstore and read on your way to some strange city where you were hoping to reinvent yourself, at least temporarily.