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De Botton is a gifted observer. His art is both to notice and meaningfully comment on facets of life too often glossed over; of beauty and elegance unappreciated. In prior works he has demonstrated the value of complex metaphysics, Proustian prose, architecture and travel--wonderful and engrossing works. However, this most recent volume strikes the tone of a mid-life crisis, of a focus on what is wrong rather than what is right; something not foreign to this frustrated attorney who would gladly trade places with a globe-trotting author. But perhaps that is the entire point of the work, we blithely judge the travails of another at our own peril.
As opposed to his prior books, Pleasures and Sorrows tends more to the discursive--it is more of a loosely related grouping of essays than a reasoned, methodical exploration of modern labors. I'm afraid that following a brilliant introduction and statement of thesis, the work lost its way in much the same manner as did the author when he attempted to travel from Bakersfield to Los Angeles yet manages to discover something noteworthy among the detritus of modern civilization. Nevertheless, even when he loses his way, his book retains the ability to force one to think about what makes effort rewarding, what makes life worth living; De Botton invites us to challenge our own assumptions.
Too often snarky and discourteous to his subjects, the author's evident frustration with modern life and reality needn't have been focused on the human subjects making their best navigation of a flawed world. There is a nobility in simply arriving home at the end of a day having secured the resources sufficient to meet one's needs.Read more ›
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The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work Unlike most people's daily jobs, reading through The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work proved to be a consistently fun activity. Alaine de Botton is an A-list writer with a talent for noticing and elevating features of everyday life that others would dismiss as merely mundane.
He (or his editors) made an ingenious selection of industries and occupations to cover in this volume, which is organized like a travel account. De Botton moves from watching cargo ships in a London harbor to observing logistics operations, which in turn stimulates him to travel to the Maldives to trace the path of the tunas that end up on English dinner tables. Subsequently he visits an English biscuit factory, drops in on a career counselor, journeys to French Guiana to watch a satellite launch, lingers with an English artist, takes a long hike with an electrical transmission engineer, calls on the London headquarters of the world's largest accounting firm, stays in London to attend a trade show for entrepreneurs seeking investors, and then ventures to Paris for a major international exhibition for the aerospace industry. He concludes in Mojave, California in a graveyard for obsolete airliners. At each stop he drolly records myriad details about the work activities, products, and services of those he encounters.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is only tangentially about what the title suggests (more to be said about this below).Read more ›
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In De Botton's "Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" a philosopher brings proustian sophistication to bear on the world of work in a bittersweet book. If you thought Marcel's agony at his grandmother's death was painful, the madeleine-lemony tang of De Botton's prose is worse, because it's universal. De Botton describes us. A new Proust writes, not about the architecture of Venice, but about logistics.
The author's philosophical vulnerability is exquisite, because he is vulnerable to criticism from both sides: from the world of fact, and from the world of feeling. De Botton's masterful solution is to use a phenomenological methodology which consciously describes the felt and the seen with sophisticated subjective precision.
De Button's method has been missed by almost all the reviewers and readers, who have evidently not read Marcel Proust, or John Ruskin, or perhaps even Adam Smith; most of them will even be unaware of Ricardo's Principle of Comparative Advantage, or even of the economics of Friedman. Such readers enter this book under-equipped. No, let's be honest: those readers are ignorant.
By contrast to his readership, De Botton is painstakingly polite and considerate in this book, and the vulgar reviews of this book display the misapprehension of readers incapable of grasping De Botton's sophistication and the subject's intrinsic complexity.
To say the least, the subject of this book is challenging. Logistics is the science of process. Philosophy, equipped more for theoretical enterprise, is faced with overwhelming difficulties in appreciating this prudent process wisely.Read more ›
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This item: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Vintage International)
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