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The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work |  | Author: Alain De Botton
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $12.99
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Seller: Abraham's Book Store
Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 60,329
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 037542444X
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.36
EAN: 9780375424441
ASIN: 037542444X
Publication Date: June 2, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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)
Product Description
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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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
 Fascinating June 14, 2009
David M. Giltinan (San Francisco)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
Alain de Botton continues to charm in this exploration of questions related to work.
The book consists of ten chapters, in each of which the author explores a specific job type in depth. The text is augmented throughout with photographs by Richard Baker, about 15 per chapter. These serve as an excellent complement to de Botton's remarks and reinforce one of the book's major strengths, which is Alain de Botton's skill for anchoring his exploration of profound questions pertaining to work (what to do with one's life? how to combine earning money with attaining fulfilment? how to balance career and family obligations?) in intelligently chosen, concrete examples.
A listing of the ten chapters gives an idea of the wide-ranging and eclectic nature of his investigation:
1. Cargo Ship Spotting
2. Logistics (including a photo essay which follows the path of a tuna from its capture in a Maldives fishing boat to the supermarket shelf)
3. Biscuit Manufacture
4. Career Counselling
5. Rocket Science
6. Painting
7. Transmission Engineering
8. Accountancy
9. Entrepeneurship
10. Aviation
The list fails to convey the charm and subtlety of de Botton's writing - to appreciate those, you'll have to read the book yourself. In each chapter there is something to delight - the author's curiosity will make you think about commonplace things in a new way, and his thoughtfulness and erudition make him a charming tour guide. The chapter on "rocket science", centred around a trip to French Guiana to report on the launch of a French-made communications satellite commissioned by a Japanese TV station, is a tour de force of nonfiction writing. But de Botton's particular talent shines through most obviously in those chapters which appear superficially least promising. You think to yourself - how can anyone write about biscuit manufacturing, or accountancy, and be interesting? Then you read the chapters in question, and re-read them, and think - how the hell did he do that?
I found the book riveting. It's certainly among the top five non-fiction books I've read in the past ten years.
The Meaning of our Labour August 25, 2009
Eric Anderson (London, United Kingdom)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Something about Alain de Botton's writing captivates me. Though great chunky paragraphs of this photo essay are taken up with things which are banal on the surface like detailed descriptions of how biscuits are manufactured or the workings of electricity lines, the author's pithy observations about the individuals involved and his asides about the nature of being are engrossing. This author investigates an eclectic range of professions such as tuna fishing, career counselling, painting and accountancy. He begins the book by pondering the complex network of work involved which delivers to us goods in our everyday lives and how we are largely blithely unaware of these goods' origins. He then investigates a series of professions as a base point, engaging with the professionals involved in order to try to understand how this labour relates to their place in the world. The result is a sort of travelogue, each section containing a large amount of photographs to accompany the text, created with the help of photographer Richard Baker. Many of these pictures are beautiful and poignant in themselves, adding an even greater depth and understanding to the text which runs alongside them.
Many of the people the author encounters are treated with a good deal of sympathy and one feels his observations to be largely accurate based on his personal impressions of them. I grew to feel admiration, respect and envy for people who are emphatically engaged in their professions and passionate about the importance of their labour. However, at some points de Botton's prose lapse almost too far into a novelistic approach so that individuals he meets are fitted into the author's schematic understanding of certain workers' reality. Thus he might make presumptions about real people by speculating about their consciousness and how they feel about their position in the world. For instance, he summarizes the end of the day for an employee from an accountancy's advisory services and concludes how this man contemplates what has been "difficult, unnecessary and regrettable" about the effort of his labour for that day. The author doesn't specify whether he gleaned this understanding of this individual's inner-existence from a revealing interview or following him home to unobtrusively observe his private life. But one can't help but feel some liberties were taken. This makes me wonder why this author who is so brilliant at investigating the liminal spaces of our existence and the most crucial issues of our lives doesn't write more novels like his first published works.
The author also touchingly interjects elements of himself in the book. This might include finding a likeness of his father in a portrait of the president of the Maldives or a melancholic mood he falls into following the launch of a satellite into space. However, though always taking himself and his enquiries seriously, one can feel a great deal of humour laden in his emphatic pondering especially when he relates this to people he encounters. At one point he desperately asks a girl working on a document about brand performance why "in our society the greatest sums of money so often tend to accrue from the sale of the least meaningful things" and at another point in the Majove desert implores the groundskeeper of an airfield populated by dilapidated airplanes to grant him closer access out of his "preoccupation with the remnants of collapsing civilisations." What is so engaging about de Botton's style is how evidently immediate and crucial the concerns he writes about are to the author himself. Yet, at the same time, he understands that life shouldn't be taken too seriously. This makes the book very personal and enjoyable as well as including profound thoughts about the nature of being. Life is full of questions and, even if no satisfactory answers can be found, Alain de Botton is bravely determined to at least explore the meaning of it all with great eloquence and wit.
Sober, even depressing, but also thoughtful, sometimes funny, and very well-written July 8, 2009
Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Most of what we humans do in the name of "work" will never be recognized, possibly never even be noticed, and will quickly crumble into dust in little less time than it takes us to crumble and die ourselves. One of humanity's greatest achievements is our ability to ignore all this and attempt to achieve things anyway.
That sober, even dark message lies at the heart of "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work," a meditation that suggests there are in our vast warehouses or soulless steel and glass office towers a lot fewer pleasures than sorrows. Even the monochrome photos that accompany the text are often depressing. But it would be too simple to categorize this as merely a downer with no redeeming virtues. On the contrary, I found this a very interesting and thought-provoking work, and quite enjoyed not only Alain de Botton's narrative skill, but particularly his ability to draw thoughtful and even philosophical conclusions from simple observations. Ultimately, de Botton dares to see the heroic in the facelessness of accounting, in the architecture of electrical pylons, even in the violence and discomfort of commercial fishing.
I've heard or read Mr. de. Botton's work in several different media now and have always found it worth savoring. "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" can be read quickly, but I think it would especially repay lingering over. Beyond the somewhat bleak first appearances, there is a lot the thoughtful reader can take away from these impressions of "work" and life.
A Deeply Moving Exploration of Work from the Banal to the Beautiful June 25, 2009
Thomas Haizlip (Greensboro, NC)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
So, do you live to work or work to live? The idea of finding fulfillment in work is a relatively new concept that emerged in the age of enlightenment. Alain De Botton is one of my very favorite authors. He brings the mind of a philosopher and the compassion of a loving friend to all his writing. In his latest book he explores our relationship with work.
From the book jacket, "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."
When I work with clients I often ask them, "What would you do if you won the lottery?" It's amazing how many very successful, wealthy people hate their work. For many it has become a set of golden handcuffs that keeps them obliged to continue due to supporting children and spouses in a high end lifestyle. They may indulge in material pleasures, but this only leads to momentary relief since the debt only keeps them even more attached to a life that no longer engages or fulfills them with any sense of meaning or purpose.
Theodore Millon, the father of the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Diagnostic manual) view of personality theory, said that people can be divided along two lines. Those who actively seek out pleasure or those who passively seek to avoid pain. While reading this book it was amazing to see how many people are not even aware of the choices they make with their own lives.
Botton concludes that your view of work depends upon your ability to create a meaningful life, add value to something you believe in, and to receive appreciation for your efforts.
If you are in a job of sorrow, your life will require a combination of distraction, recuperation, coffee and alcohol. For those poor souls, self-awareness only adds to their misery and Botton describes these people as deserving pity, but being unaware of the need for it.
If you want to look at work and life through a wider lens, I strongly recommend this book.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work July 15, 2009
J. L. Kipp (Gnaw Bone, Indiana,USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Very provocative and insightful. With the use of such an expansive vocabulary do not expect a quick read; the book is Englsh and not American. This work is really a series of stand alone essays and lacks a siitable conclusion. You will reread many passages and will be left with a great deal to think and talk about with your friends.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
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