When the Blizzard of 2010 shut down London’s Heathrow Airport during the Christmas rush, the resulting criticism caused the executive who runs the place to forego his annual bonus. But that storm has passed, and for frequent fliers who want to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes at Terminal 5, one of Europe’s biggest passenger terminals, a recent paperback from Vintage Books is just the ticket.
   The arrival any book by Alain de Botton is welcome in my library, so I was pleased to find A Week at the Airport shortly after the holidays. De Botton, the bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Architecture of Happiness, was an inspired choice as Heathrow's writer-in-residence. He’s an elegant stylist and an original thinker, with a particular knack for interpreting the mundane predicaments of modern life in ways that illuminate their underlying meanings and their importance to the individual. One suspects, in fact, that he’s describing his own works when he tells a bookseller at the airport, “I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”
   A Week at the Airport is illustrated with a series of subtle, yet revealing, color photos by Richard Baker. Together, the writer and photographer expose both the public face of T5, which cost $7.6 billion and took nearly six years to build, and it’s backstage geography.

    At one point during jury selection for the trial of Terry Nichols, the second accused Oklahoma City bomber, Judge Richard Matsch told the lawyers, “There is no precedent for the challenge we face here.”
    It’s unlikely that Michael Tigar, leader of the Nichols defense team, had to be reminded of that fact. He knows only too well the daunting task he and his colleagues face. It’s their job to find jurors who believe in the propriety of the death penalty, yet who—if they first convict Nichols of the most bloody mass murder in American history—would be willing, for some reason as yet unknown to them, to spare his life.
    Among defenders and prosecutors alike, Tigar has earned a reputation as one of the most skilled trial lawyers in the business. To watch him conduct jury selection in the Nichols case is to understand why.
    The chess game that is jury selection in a capital case begins with a ground rule that gives the prosecution a distinct advantage. That rule is called “death qualification.” It means that only people who are capable of imposing a death sentence can be considered for service on the jury; those who are opposed to the death penalty as a matter of principle are excluded.