Alain De Botton

### Review “Imagine, of all impossible things, a young British Woody Allen with the benefit of a classical education and you have the nameless and exquisitely erudite narrator of **Essays in Love**.” — *Boston Sunday Globe* “The book’s success has much to do with its beautifully modeled sentences, its wry humor, its unwavering deadpan respect for its reader’s intelligence.” — Francine Prose in *The New Republic* ### Product Description The bestselling author of **The Architecture of Happiness** and **How Proust Can Change Your Life** revisits his utterly charming debut book, **Essays in Love**. The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris-to-London flight, and by the time they’ve reached the luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair, watery green eyes, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, and her views on Heidegger’s **Being and Time** — but he hates her taste in shoes. What makes this book extraordinary is the depth with which the emotions involved in the relationship are analysed. Love comes under the philosophical microscope. Plotting the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through a fit of anhedonia — defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness — and finally through the terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away, **Essays in Love** is filled with profound and witty observations on the pain and exhilaration of love. An entire chapter is devoted to the nuances and subtexts of an initial date, while another chapter mulls over the question of how and when to say “I love you.” With allusions to Aristotle, Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Groucho Marx, de Botton has plotted an imaginative and microscopically detailed romance.

Curiously practical&#8212;this no-nonsense blend of literary biography and self-help unravels how interesting life can be if only you could resist the impulse to rush through the mundane rituals of modern life. Every morning, Marcel Proust sipped his two cups of strong coffee with milk, ate a croissant from one boulangerie, dunking it in his coffee as he slowly read the day's paper with great care&#8212;poring over each headline and section. <br> Only Alain de Botton could have pulled so many useful insights from the oeuvre of one the world's greatest literary masters. Fascinating and vital, <i>How to Take Your Time</i> will urge you to find the wisdom in defying "the self-satisfaction felt by 'busy' men&#8212;however idiotic their business&#8212;at 'not having time' to do what you are doing." <br>A Vintage Shorts Wellness selection. An ebook short.

<p>The best-selling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Art of Travel revisits his utterly charming debut novel, On Love. The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris&#8211;London flight, and by the time they've reached the luggage carousel he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair, watery green eyes, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, and her views on Heidegger's Being and Time &#8212; but he hates her taste in shoes. Plotting the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through a fit of anhedonia &#8212; defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness &#8212; and finally through the terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away, On Love is filled with profound observations and useful diagrams, examining for all of us the pain and exhilaration of love.

**From the author of *The Consolations of Philosophy* , a deeply provocative and useful argument about how we can benefit from the wisdom and power of religion--without having to "believe" in any of it.** Debates about religion have been hugely and in some ways boringly polarized in recent years: On the one side are those who argue that religion should be our sole source of truth and insight. And on the other side are those who propose (with equal intransigence) that religion is childish nonsense and should be discarded by all right-thinking people. Into this increasingly sterile debate Alain de Botton now launches a revolutionary argument. He starts with a bold proposal: let's imagine that God doesn't exist, and yet that religion nevertheless has a lot to teach us. Why do we feel the need to choose between committing to belief in immaterial deities or letting go entirely of the consoling rituals and practices that belief carries with it and for which there...

What if religions are neither all true nor all nonsense? The long-running and often boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved forward by Alain de Botton’s inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are entirely false—but that it still has some very important things to teach the secular world. Religion for Atheists suggests that rather than mocking religion, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from it—because the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies. Blending deep respect with total impiety, de Botton (a non-believer himself) proposes that we look to religion for insights into how to, among other concerns, build a sense of community, make our relationships last, overcome feelings of envy and inadequacy, inspire travel and reconnect with the natural world. For too long non-believers have faced a stark choice between either swallowing some peculiar doctrines or doing away with a range of consoling and beautiful rituals and ideas. At last, in Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton has fashioned a far more interesting and truly helpful alternative.

**“There's no writer alive like de Botton” (** Chicago Tribune **), and now this internationally heralded author turns his attention to the insatiable human quest for status—a quest that has less to do with material comfort than love.** Anyone who’s ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor’s Lexus had better read Alain de Botton’s irresistibly clear-headed new book, immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents explores the notion that our pursuit of status is actually a pursuit of love, ranging through Western history and thought from St. Augustine to Andrew Carnegie and Machiavelli to Anthony Robbins. Whether it’s assessing the class-consciousness of Christianity or the convulsions of consumer capitalism, dueling or home-furnishing, *Status Anxiety* is infallibly entertaining. And when it examines the virtues of informed misanthropy, art appreciation, or walking a lobster on a leash, it is not only wise but helpful.

<p><b>A book to offer clarity and guidance when facing the difficult decision of whether your relationship has a future.</b> <br>Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront. <br>What makes the issue so hard is that there are no fixed rules for judgement. How can we tell whether a relationship is 'good enough' or plain wrong? How do we draw the line between justified longing and naivety? Does someone 'better' actually exist? Should the feelings of children be counted (and what might they be in the long term)? Could one's partner change, perhaps with therapy, or should one assume that who they are now is who they will always be? <br>All these questions typically haunt our minds as we weigh up whether to stay or go. With no axe to grind or ideology to promote, Stay or Leave walks us gently through our options, opening our minds to perspectives we might not have considered. <br>This book aims...

Any Baedeker will tell us *where* we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us *how* and *why.* With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to **How Proust Can Save Your Life** *,* de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow. Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. **The Art of Travel** is a wise and utterly original book. Don't leave home without it. *From the Trade Paperback edition.*

<p>From the author of <b>How Proust Can Change Your Life</b>, a delightful, truly consoling work that proves that philosophy can be a supreme source of help for our most painful everyday problems.<br><br>Perhaps only Alain de Botton could uncover practical wisdom in the writings of some of the greatest thinkers of all time. But uncover he does, and the result is an unexpected book of both solace and humor. Dividing his work into six sections -- each highlighting a different psychic ailment and the appropriate philosopher -- de Botton offers consolation for unpopularity from Socrates, for not having enough money from Epicurus, for frustration from Seneca, for inadequacy from Montaigne, and for a broken heart from Schopenhauer (the darkest of thinkers and yet, paradoxically, the most cheering). Consolation for envy -- and, of course, the final word on consolation -- comes from Nietzsche: "Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us."<br><br>This wonderfully engaging...

<p><b>A parenting guide providing compassionate instruction and insight into raising a resilient, well-balanced child.</b></p> <p>Bringing up a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life's great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck.</p> <p>The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of life lessons, including how to say 'no' to a child you adore, how to look beneath the surface of 'bad' behavior to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence.</p> <p>Most importantly, this is a book that knows that perfection is not required &#8211; and could indeed be dangerous, because a key job of any parent is to induct a child gently into the imperfect nature of everything. Written in a tone that is encouraging, wry, and soaked in years of experience, The Good Enough Parent is an intelligent guide to raising a child who will one day look back on their childhood...

### Amazon.com Review **Book Description** We spend most of our waking lives at work—in occupations often chosen by our unthinking younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us. *The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work* is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully evoking what other people wake up to do each day—and night—to make the frenzied contemporary world function. With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art—in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying. Along the way he tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can ask about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? And why do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also the planet? Characteristically lucid, witty and inventive, Alain de Botton’s “song for occupations” is a celebration and exploration of an aspect of life which is all too often ignored and a book that shines a revealing light on the essential meaning of work in our lives. * * * **Alain de Botton on *The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work*** I wrote *The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work* to shine a spotlight on the working world. I wanted to write a book that would open our eyes to the beauty and occasional horror of the working world—and I did this by looking at 10 different industries, a deliberately eclectic range from accountancy to engineering, from biscuit manufacture to logistics. The strangest thing about the world of work is the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy. For thousands of years, work was viewed as something to be done with as rapidly as possible and escaped in the imagination through alcohol or religion. Aristotle was the first of many philosophers to state that no one could be both free and obliged to earn a living. A more optimistic assessment of work had to wait until the eighteenth century and men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin, who for the first time argued that one's working life could be at the centre of any desire for happiness. It was during this century that our modern ideas about work were formed—at the very same time as our modern ideas about love and marriage took shape. In the pre-modern age, it was assumed that no one could try to be in love and married: marriage was something one did for purely commercial reasons. Things were going well if you maintained a tepid friendship with your spouse. Meanwhile, love was something you did with your mistress, with pleasure untied to the responsibilities of child-rearing. Yet the new philosophers of love argued that one might actually aim to marry the person one was in love with rather than just have an affair. To this unusual idea was added the even more peculiar notion that one might work both for money and to realise one's dreams, an idea that replaced the previous assumption that the day job took care of the rent and anything more ambitious had to happen in one's spare time. We are the heirs of these two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married, and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human. Thus is born *The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work*. *—Alain de Botton* (Photo © Roderick Field) ### From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. This pensive study explores work not as an economic or sociological phenomenon but as an existential predicament. Observing an eclectic sample of workers, from fishermen to a CEO of an accounting firm, de Botton (_How Proust Can Change Your Life_) counterposes the expansive intelligence embodied in vast business organizations with the blinkered routines of their human cogs and finds that tension rife with philosophical conundrums. Cookie marketers illustrate the link between happiness and triviality in bourgeois society; office drones wear a mask of shallow cheerfulness over the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues; a visit to a satellite launch center contrasts the restrained self-effacement of rocket scientists with their power to upstage the gods during fiery blastoffs. De Botton's humanism recoils at the banality, crassness and forced optimism of the business mindset, but he admires its ability to construct the world—and even finds poetry in a supermarket supply chain that flies blood-red strawberries... over the Arctic Circle by moonlight, leaving a trail of nitrous oxide across a black and gold sky. (The book includes evocative photos of commercial and industrial sites.) De Botton's sprightly mix of reportage and rumination expands beyond the workplace to investigate the broader meaning of life. *(June 2)* Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.