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The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Alain De Botton
Pantheon
June 2009
On Sale: June 2, 2009
336 pages ISBN: 037542444X EAN: 9780375424441 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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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