Book of the week: Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)

When most of us look out an airplane window on final approach, we generally see a dreary landscape of warehouses and subdivisions, said Wayne Curtis in The Wall Street Journal. The authors of Aerotropolis instead see “a bright, prosperous future” in which airports aren’t just conduits but destinations, marked by shiny corporate headquarters, luxury housing, and fine dining. Though business professor John Kasarda has been predicting this for years, “I’d wager that the notion is about to occupy a little more real estate in the popular imagination.”

In many places, including Memphis, Louisville, and Dallas-Fort Worth, that future is here, said Michael Powell in The New York Times. Yet these airport cities still “fall a few watts short” of, say, Paris. And while this book “offers intriguing arguments,” it’s too quick to dismiss such concerns as air travel’s dependency on oil. “I could not shake the sense that something had gone missing from their vision of our future—something like a soul.”

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