Alain de Botton continues to put out accessible, enjoyable works of inqiury and practical philosophy. This work-centered volume is divided up into several sections, each exploring what it's like to labor in a different field: satellite launching, cookies, electrical towers, accounting, et cetera. Work defines our lives in so many ways; it's pleasurable and illuminating to view the world through the lenses of other metiers. (What's it like to spend one's life trying to engineer a new cookie? How did rocket launches, once considered spectacles of global wonder, become routine, a mere chore for Japanese TV executives?) Botton's light and elegant prose is a delight, much like his ability to be amusing while never mocking his subjects. Like most of his work, this book is a fine tool for gaining some perspective on the life one leads.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton presents a series of essays on working life, each one focused on a different industry or career. In his own words, de Botton is attempting "a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life's meaning." De Botton’s essays, written in his satisfyingly dense and artful prose, are accompanied by haunting black-and-white photographs illustrating either the bleakness or the beauty, and sometimes both, of our modern work landscapes.

De Botton’s aim in examining our working lives is two-fold. In addition to exploring our motivations to work and the meaning we hope to draw from our jobs, de Botton seeks to pierce the superficiality of our material world. Instead of viewing a package of cookies on the grocery store shelf as a simple afternoon snack, de Botton exhorts us to get beyond the surface to consider the hundreds, if not thousands, of people working every day to ensure those cookies are available to us. In this way, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is striving “to mitigate the deadening, uniquely modern sense of dislocation between the things we so heedlessly consume in the run of our daily lives and their unknown origins and creators."

Occasionally, de Botton's focus on certain unsavory details (like the smell of "freshly boiled cabbage or swede" pervading the home office of a career counselor) comes close to condescension. More often, de Botton treats his subjects with empathy and sensitivity. This beautifully designed and produced book is a pleasure to read.

This review also appears on my literary blog Literary License. ( )

With every sentence that Alain de Botton writes, he only reaffirms his place at the top of my short list of favorite living writers. There are few authors who are capable of writing even a single article (let alone an entire book) that is so intellectually stimulating and even fewer who can communicate in such a witty and charming style. Indeed, since it's not out of order to call de Botton a philosopher, I tend to add "poet" to that, too. While reading, I struggle with two competing desires: to devour the book in a single sitting versus slowly savoring every sentence. I ordered this as a birthday present to myself from amazon.co.uk (I prefer the British covers of de Botton's work) and while it has not unseated On Love and The Art of Travel as my favorites of his books, I was still quite pleased with The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. I only wish that de Botton had spent as much time deliberating on the less tangible concepts associated with work as he did reporting the facts of specific working lives, for his eloquent arguments of a more philosophical nature are always utterly fascinating.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton poses a number of questions about work... What is it that has driven us into our respective occupations? Do we enjoy it? Why do we keep waking up day after day to do it? What does it mean to us? What does it mean to the larger world? Are we, in fact, capable of loving what we do on a daily basis? Do we have to in order to have a meaningful life?

Of course, what's interesting is that the majority of the book is not spent wrestling with these questions... but rather, these are the questions that spurred the author towards this topic. These are the questions that might be asked in book clubs when discussing this book, and these are the questions that are truly compelling... but rather than answer them directly (as I feel his other works are at least prone to attempt), de Botton seems to leave these open. Instead of expounding on the philosophical implications of our occupational choices, he has become more of a documentarian in both word and image, with a photograph on nearly every page. These pictures of warehouses, electrical pylons, and conference booths illustrate what often comes across as a bleak beauty to scenes of people at work or the results of our labor. And so this books ends up being much more about the people he interviews and their occupations rather than de Botton's thoughts on work. He is a reporter who comes back with astute observations, but does not delve too far into analyzing particular people or groups. I wonder if it was too personal or if he felt things might be too judgmental if he drew any conclusions from specific examples. I found it interesting that he completely refrained from personal musing on his own career (beyond occasionally offering a self-deprecating comment on his own failings in comparison to, say, inventors or engineers), though he purposely focuses on jobs that aren't often in the limelight. We go through ten separate "studies" of occupations that span a broad spectrum, where de Botton speaks with those people who have found themselves performing this work on a near daily basis.

Not since Walt Whitman have I found a writer so successful at conveying the dignity of work while still leaving room for us to ask if we are truly fulfilled. As I've already noted, my only wish was that there was more Alain de Botton in this book, but I think he's produced a fascinating study that will have you spending as much time in thought about your own occupation as you spend reading this book... and for a philosopher, I think that's an excellent goal to have achieved.

Here's a few links to other reviews of the book, and below, I included a piece that Alain de Botton wrote on why he settled on this topic.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...
http://www.economist.com/displayStory...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...

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 ( )

This is the first book I've ever read from de Boton and it had a serene and Zen-like effect on me for a while. It was not very coherent, it did not contain very detailed analyses on the sociology of work and it jumped among diverse sectors such as from a biscuit factory in Belgium to a Japanese satellite launch in French Guiana but whatever de Boton described, he described in a subtle and sophisticated way which made me really smile without much change in my facial muscles. Alain de Boton is sometimes an armchair anthropologist wandering around the fishermen of exotic seas, a psychologist observing the dynamics of an international corporation, a postmodern philosopher gazing at the deep meanings reverberating from an aviation cemetery in the middle of an American desert.

The author's keen observations combined with a witty sense of humor makes this book a reading you'll possibly never regret. Especially the chapter which tells about a not so famous painter working to create meaning that extends beyond the temporary physical existence of a single mind may give the opportunity to reconsider what it really means to work. As the final sentence I'd like to thank to the photographer which helped me to the see even the most ordinary scenes like I have never seen before. ( )