Alain de Botton's Books

How to Take Your Time

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

By: Alain De Botton

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How to Take Your Time

from How Proust Can Change Your Life

By: Alain De Botton

Curiously practical—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—poring over each headline and section. 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, How to Take Your Time will urge you to find the wisdom in defying “the self-satisfaction felt by ‘busy’ men—however idiotic their business—at ‘not having time’ to do what you are doing.” A Vintage Shorts Wellness selection. An ebook short.

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Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0525435026

ISBN 13

9780525435020

On Love

A Novel

By: Alain de Botton

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On Love

A Novel

By: Alain de Botton

The New York Times–bestselling author’s modern classic that “takes a conventional love story and textures it with philosophical ruminations” (Kirkus Reviews). A man and a woman meet over casual conversation on a flight from Paris to London, and so begins a love story—from first kiss to first argument, elation to heartbreak, and everything in between. Each stage of the relationship is illuminated with starling clarity, as novelist and philosopher Alain de Botton explores young love and its emotions, often felt but rarely understood. With a brilliant new introduction by Sheila Heti, the New York Times-bestselling author of How Should a Person Be?, On Love is a contemporary classic from an author “who seems to have been born to write” (The Boston Globe). “Smart and ironic…The book’s success has much to do with its beautifully modeled sentences, its wry humor, and its unwavering deadpan respect for the reader's intelligence.” —Francine Prose, New Republic “Witty, funny, sophisticated…full of wise and illuminating insights.” —P.J. Kavanagh, Spectator

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Page Count

146

Publisher

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802189962

ISBN 13

9780802189967

On Love

A Novel

By: Alain de Botton

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On Love

A Novel

By: Alain de Botton

In a novel that explores the realities of "being in love," two young people meet on a plane to Paris and embark on a love affair based on what they perceive as destiny. A first novel. Reader's Guide included. Reprint.

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Page Count

214

Publisher

Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802142400

ISBN 13

9780802142405

The Course of Love

A Novel

By: Alain de Botton

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The Course of Love

A Novel

By: Alain de Botton

How does love survive and thrive in the long term? In Edinburgh, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love, get married, have children. But this is their story after the first flush of infatuation. As Rabih and Kirsten reform their ideals under the pressures of an average existence, they discover that love is a skill that needs to be learned, and not just experienced.

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240

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501134515

ISBN 13

9781501134517

Status Anxiety

By: Alain De Botton

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Status Anxiety

By: Alain De Botton

“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.

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Page Count

322

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307491331

ISBN 13

9780307491336

How Proust Can Change Your Life

By: Alain De Botton

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How Proust Can Change Your Life

By: Alain De Botton

A bestselling author draws on the work of one of history’s most important writers to show us how to best live life in a book that’s "delightfully original.... A self-help book in the deepest sense of the term" (The New York Times). Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres—literary biography and self-help manual—in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life. Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to live life? Proust understood that the essence and value of life was the sum of its everyday parts. As relevant today as they were at the turn of the century, Proust's life and work are transformed here into a no-nonsense guide to, among other things, enjoying your vacation, reviving a relationship, achieving original and unclichéd articulation, being a good host, recognizing love, and understanding why you should never sleep with someone on a first date. It took de Botton to find the inspirational in Proust's essays, letters and fiction and, perhaps even more surprising, to draw out a vivid and clarifying portrait of the master from between the lines of his work. Here is Proust as we have never seen or read him before: witty, intelligent, pragmatic. He might well change your life.

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Page Count

210

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0679779159

ISBN 13

9780679779155

The Art of Travel

By: Alain De Botton

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The Art of Travel

By: Alain De Botton

A wise and utterly original book of travel essays from an international bestselling author that will “give one an expansive sense of wonder” (The Baltimore Sun). 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 “refreshing and profoundly readable" book (The Philadelphia Inquirer). Don’t leave home without it.

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239

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307481662

ISBN 13

9780307481665

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

By: Alain De Botton

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The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

By: Alain De Botton

From the international bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life comes this lyrical, erudite look at our world of work. We spend most of our time at work, but what we do there rarely gets discussed in the sort of lyrical and descriptive prose our efforts surely deserve. Determined to correct this lapse, armed with a poetic perspective and his trademark philosophical sharpness, Alain de Botton heads out into the world of offices and factories, ready to take in the beauty, interest, and sheer strangeness of the modern workplace. De Botton spends time in and around some less familiar work environments, including warehouses, container ports, rocket launch pads, and power stations, and follows scientists, landscape painters, accountants, cookie manufacturers, therapists, entrepreneurs, and aircraft salesmen as they do their jobs. Along the way, de Botton tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can pose about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? To what end do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also our planet? Equally intrigued by work’s pleasures and its pains, Alain de Botton offers a characteristically lucid and witty tour of the working day and night, in a book sure to inspire a range of life-changing and wise thoughts.

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Page Count

338

Publisher

Emblem Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

0771026323

ISBN 13

9780771026324

The Romantic Movement

Sex, Shopping, and the Novel

By: Alain de Botton

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The Romantic Movement

Sex, Shopping, and the Novel

By: Alain de Botton

A novel on two young people in love who are trying to make a science of it. The protagonists are Eric and Alice, both in their twenties. He is in banking, she is in advertising. With graphs and charts.

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334

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0312144032

ISBN 13

9780312144036

The Consolations of Philosophy

By: Alain De Botton

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The Consolations of Philosophy

By: Alain De Botton

From the internationally heralded author of How Proust Can Change Your Life comes a remarkable book that presents the wisdom of some of the greatest thinkers of the ages as advice for our day to day struggles. "A fine introduction the world of philosophy." —Newsweek Solace for the broken heart can be found in the words of Schopenhauer. The ancient Greek Epicurus has the wisest, and most affordable, solution to cash flow problems. A remedy for impotence lies in Montaigne. Seneca offers advice upon losing a job. And Nietzsche has shrewd counsel for everything from loneliness to illness. The Consolations of Philosophy is a book as accessibly erudite as it is useful and entertaining.

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273

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0679779175

ISBN 13

9780679779179

Kiss & Tell

By: Alain de Botton

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Kiss & Tell

By: Alain de Botton

A man accused by women of narcissism tries to show more interest in his next one, only to discover women don't like too much attention either. A romantic comedy set in Britain by the author of On Love.

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284

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0312155611

ISBN 13

9780312155612

Religion for Atheists

A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

By: Alain De Botton

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Religion for Atheists

A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

By: Alain De Botton

From the author of The Architecture of Happiness, a deeply moving meditation on how we can still benefit, without believing, from the wisdom, the beauty, and the consolatory power that religion has to offer. Alain de Botton was brought up in a committedly atheistic household, and though he was powerfully swayed by his parents' views, he underwent, in his mid-twenties, a crisis of faithlessness. His feelings of doubt about atheism had their origins in listening to Bach's cantatas, were further developed in the presence of certain Bellini Madonnas, and became overwhelming with an introduction to Zen architecture. However, it was not until his father's death -- buried under a Hebrew headstone in a Jewish cemetery because he had intriguingly omitted to make more secular arrangements -- that Alain began to face the full degree of his ambivalence regarding the views of religion that he had dutifully accepted. Why are we presented with the curious choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle and effective rituals and practices for which there is no equivalent in secular society? Why do we bristle at the mention of the word "morality"? Flee from the idea that art should be uplifting, or have an ethical purpose? Why don't we build temples? What mechanisms do we have for expressing gratitude? The challenge that de Botton addresses in his book: how to separate ideas and practices from the religious institutions that have laid claim to them. In Religion for Atheists is an argument to free our soul-related needs from the particular influence of religions, even if it is, paradoxically, the study of religion that will allow us to rediscover and rearticulate those needs.

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Page Count

298

Publisher

Signal

Published Date

ISBN 10

0771025998

ISBN 13

9780771025990

Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?

By: Steven Pinker,Matt Ridley,Alain de Botton,Malcolm Gladwell

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Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead?

By: Steven Pinker,Matt Ridley,Alain de Botton,Malcolm Gladwell

‘It’s just a brute fact that we don’t throw virgins into volcanoes any more. We don’t execute people for shoplifting a cabbage. And we used to.’ –Steven Pinker ‘The idea that because things have gotten better in the past they will continue to do so in the future is a fallacy I would have thought confined to the lower reaches of Wall Street.’ –Malcolm Gladwell In a world driven by technology and globalization, is humanity approaching a Golden Age or is the notion of progress a Western delusion? Four of the world’s most renowned thinkers take on one of the biggest debates of the modern era…

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Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1786070774

ISBN 13

9781786070777

The Architecture of Happiness

By: Alain de Botton

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The Architecture of Happiness

By: Alain de Botton

Bestselling author Alain de Botton has written about love, travel, status and how philosophy can console us. Now he turns his attention to one of our most intense but often hidden love affairs: with our houses and their furnishings. He asks: What makes a house truly beautiful?Why are many new houses so ugly?Why do we argue so bitterly about sofas and pictures � and can differences of taste ever be satisfactorily resolved?Will minimalism make us happier than ornaments? To answer these questions and many more, de Botton looks at buildings across the world, from medieval wooden huts to modern skyscrapers; he examines sofas and cathedrals, tea sets and office complexes, and teases out a host of often surprising philosophical insights. The Architecture of Happiness will take you on a beguiling tour through the history and psychology of architecture and interior design, and will forever alter your relationship with buildings. It will change the way you look at your current home � and help you make the right decisions about your next one.

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Page Count

385

Publisher

Penguin UK

Published Date

ISBN 10

0141015004

ISBN 13

9780141015002

The Meaning of Life

By: Alain de Botton,School of Life (Business enterprise)

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The Meaning of Life

By: Alain de Botton,School of Life (Business enterprise)

A thought-provoking guide to one of the greatest questions we will ever face - what is the meaning of life?

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ISBN 10

1912891182

ISBN 13

9781912891184

A Week at the Airport

By: Alain De Botton

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A Week at the Airport

By: Alain De Botton

The bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and The Art of Travel spends a week at an airport in a wittily intriguing meditation on the "non-place" that he believes is the centre of our civilization. In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton was invited by the owners of Heathrow airport to become their first ever writer-in-residence. Given unprecedented, unrestricted access to wander around one of the world's busiest airports, he met travellers from all over the globe, and spoke with everyone from baggage handlers to pilots, and senior executives to the airport chaplain. Based on these conversations he has produced this extraordinary meditation on the nature of travel, work, relationships, and our daily lives. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, he explores the magical and the mundane, and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious "non-place," which by definition we are eager to leave. Taking the reader through departures, "air-side," and the arrivals hall, de Botton shows with his usual combination of wit and wisdom that spending time in an airport can be more revealing than we might think.

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113

Publisher

Emblem Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

0771026293

ISBN 13

9780771026294

Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead?

The Munk Debates

By: Steven Pinker,Matt Ridley,Alain de Botton,Malcolm Gladwell

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Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead?

The Munk Debates

By: Steven Pinker,Matt Ridley,Alain de Botton,Malcolm Gladwell

Progress. It is one of the animating concepts of the modern era. From the Enlightenment onwards, the West has had an enduring belief that through the evolution of institutions, innovations, and ideas, the human condition is improving. This process is supposedly accelerating as new technologies, individual freedoms, and the spread of global norms empower individuals and societies around the world. But is progress inevitable? Its critics argue that human civilization has become different, not better, over the last two and a half centuries. What is seen as a breakthrough or innovation in one period becomes a setback or limitation in another. In short, progress is an ideology not a fact; a way of thinking about the world as opposed to a description of reality. In the seventeenth semi-annual Munk Debates, which was held in Toronto on November 6, 2015, pioneering cognitive scientist Steven Pinker and bestselling author Matt Ridley squared off against noted philosopher Alain de Botton and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell to debate whether humankind’s best days lie ahead.

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House of Anansi

Published Date

ISBN 10

148700169X

ISBN 13

9781487001698

A Week at the Airport

A Heathrow Diary

By: Alain De Botton

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A Week at the Airport

A Heathrow Diary

By: Alain De Botton

In the summer of 2009, Alain de Botton will be invited by the owners of Heathrow airport to become their first ever Writer in Residence. He will be installed in the middle of Terminal 5 on a raised platform with a laptop connected to screens, enabling passengers to see what he is writing and to come and share their stories. He will meet travellers from around the world, and will be given unprecedented access to wander the airport and speak with everyone from window cleaners and baggage handlers to air traffic controllers and cabin crew. Working with the renowned documentary photographer Richard Baker, de Botton will produce an extraordinary meditation upon the nature of place, time, and our daily lives. He will explore the magical and the mundane, personal and collective experiences and the interactions of travellers and workers all over this familiar but mysterious site. Like all airports, Heathrow (the 15th century village of Heath Row lies beneath the short stay car park) is a 'non-place' that we by definition want to leave, but it also provides a window into many worlds - through the thousands of people it dispatches every day. A Week at the Airport is sure to delight de Botton's large following, and anyone interested in the stories behind the way we live.

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Page Count

107

Publisher

Profile Books(GB)

Published Date

ISBN 10

1846683599

ISBN 13

9781846683596

Art as Therapy

From the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria

By: Alain De Botton,National Gallery of Victoria,John Armstrong

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Art as Therapy

From the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria

By: Alain De Botton,National Gallery of Victoria,John Armstrong

Renowned philosophers & authors Alain de Botton & John Armstrong explore the therapeutic potential of art, contextualise fifty eight individual or groups of works in the NGV collection according to their potential to help & guide us with some of life's everyday problems: work, love, status, self worth & questions of morality.

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ISBN 10

0724103880

ISBN 13

9780724103881

The Course of Love

A Novel

By: Alain de Botton

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The Course of Love

A Novel

By: Alain de Botton

“An engrossing tale [that] provides plenty of food for thought” (People, Best New Books pick), this playful, wise, and profoundly moving second novel from the internationally bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life tracks the beautifully complicated arc of a romantic partnership. We all know the headiness and excitement of the early days of love. But what comes after? In Edinburgh, a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children—but no long-term relationship is as simple as “happily ever after.” The Course of Love explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence. We see, along with Rabih and Kirsten, the first flush of infatuation, the effortlessness of falling into romantic love, and the course of life thereafter. Interwoven with their story and its challenges is an overlay of philosophy—an annotation and a guide to what we are reading. As The New York Times says, “The Course of Love is a return to the form that made Mr. de Botton’s name in the mid-1990s….love is the subject best suited to his obsessive aphorizing, and in this novel he again shows off his ability to pin our hopes, methods, and insecurities to the page.” This is a Romantic novel in the true sense, one interested in exploring how love can survive and thrive in the long term. The result is a sensory experience—fictional, philosophical, psychological—that urges us to identify deeply with these characters and to reflect on his and her own experiences in love. Fresh, visceral, and utterly compelling, The Course of Love is a provocative and life-affirming novel for everyone who believes in love. “There’s no writer alive like de Botton, and his latest ambitious undertaking is as enlightening and humanizing as his previous works” (Chicago Tribune).

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240

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501134434

ISBN 13

9781501134432

Religion for Atheists

A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

By: Alain De Botton

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Religion for Atheists

A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

By: Alain De Botton

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.

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297

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307907104

ISBN 13

9780307907103

Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead?

The Munk Debates

By: Steven Pinker,Matt Ridley,Alain de Botton,Malcolm Gladwell

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Do Humankind’s Best Days Lie Ahead?

The Munk Debates

By: Steven Pinker,Matt Ridley,Alain de Botton,Malcolm Gladwell

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House of Anansi

Published Date

ISBN 10

148700169X

ISBN 13

9781487001698

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

By: Alain De Botton

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The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

By: Alain De Botton

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338

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Emblem Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

0771026323

ISBN 13

9780771026324

The Architecture of Happiness

By: Alain De Botton

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The Architecture of Happiness

By: Alain De Botton

Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness. In this witty, erudite look at how we shape, and are shaped by, our surroundings, Alain de Botton applies Stendhal’s motto that “Beauty is the promise of happiness” to the spaces we inhabit daily. Why should we pay attention to what architecture has to say to us? de Botton asks provocatively. With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks. On an individual level, de Botton has deep sympathy for our need to see our selves reflected in our surroundings; he demonstrates with great wisdom how buildings — just like friends — can serve as guardians of our identity. Worrying about the shape of our sofa or the colour of our walls might seem self-indulgent, but de Botton considers the hopes and fears we have for our homes at a new level of depth and insight. When shopping for furniture or remodelling the kitchen, we don’t just consider functionality but also the major questions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art: What is beauty? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Can beauty bring happiness? The buildings we find beautiful, de Botton concludes, are those that represent our ideas of a meaningful life. The Architecture of Happiness marks a return to what Alain does best — taking on a subject whose allure is at once tantalizing and a little forbidding and offering to readers a completely beguiling and original exploration of the subject. As he did with Proust, philosophy, and travel, now he does with architecture.

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289

Publisher

McClelland & Stewart

Published Date

ISBN 10

1551993872

ISBN 13

9781551993874

The News: A User's Manual

By: Alain De Botton

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The News: A User's Manual

By: Alain De Botton

The news is everywhere. We can’t stop constantly checking it on our computer screens, but what is this doing to our minds? We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day, writes Alain de Botton (author of the best-selling The Architecture of Happiness), but this has a huge impact on our sense of what matters and of how we should lead our lives. In his dazzling new book, de Botton takes twenty-five archetypal news stories—including an airplane crash, a murder, a celebrity interview and a political scandal—and submits them to unusually intense analysis with a view to helping us navigate our news-soaked age. He raises such questions as Why are disaster stories often so uplifting? What makes the love lives of celebrities so interesting? Why do we enjoy watching politicians being brought down? Why are upheavals in far-off lands often so boring? In The News: A User’s Manual, de Botton has written the ultimate guide for our frenzied era, certain to bring calm, understanding and a measure of sanity to our daily (perhaps even hourly) interactions with the news machine. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)

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207

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307911721

ISBN 13

9780307911728

The Consolations of Philosophy

By: Alain De Botton

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The Consolations of Philosophy

By: Alain De Botton

From the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, a delightful, truly consoling work that proves that philosophy can be a supreme source of help for our most painful everyday problems. 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." This wonderfully engaging book will, however, make us feel better in a good way, with equal measures of wit and wisdom.

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273

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

030783350X

ISBN 13

9780307833501

Status Anxiety

By: Alain De Botton

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Status Anxiety

By: Alain De Botton

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Page Count

322

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307491331

ISBN 13

9780307491336

The Art of Travel

By: Alain De Botton

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The Art of Travel

By: Alain De Botton

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Age

Page Count

239

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307481662

ISBN 13

9780307481665

Theory of the Subject

By: Alain Badiou

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Theory of the Subject

By: Alain Badiou

Badiou is widely considered to be France's most important and exciting contemporary thinker. Much of Badiou's earlier work (including Being and Event) can only be fully understood with a clear grasp of Theory of the Subject, one of his most important works.

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