The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Starred review from April 13, 2009
This pensive study explores work not as an economic or sociological phenomenon but as an existential predicament. Observing an eclectic sample of workers, from fishermen to a CEO of an accounting firm, de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life
) counterposes “the expansive intelligence” embodied in vast business organizations with the blinkered routines of their human cogs and finds that tension rife with philosophical conundrums. Cookie marketers illustrate the link between happiness and triviality in bourgeois society; office drones wear “a mask of shallow cheerfulness” over “the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues”; a visit to a satellite launch center contrasts the restrained self-effacement of rocket scientists with their power to “upstage the gods” during fiery blastoffs. De Botton's humanism recoils at the banality, crassness and forced optimism of the business mindset, but he admires its ability to construct the world—and even finds poetry in a supermarket supply chain that flies “blood-red strawberries... over the Arctic Circle by moonlight, leaving a trail of nitrous oxide across a black and gold sky.” (The book includes evocative photos of commercial and industrial sites.) De Botton's sprightly mix of reportage and rumination expands beyond the workplace to investigate the broader meaning of life.

Starred review from April 1, 2009
Novelist/essayist de Botton (The Architecture of Happiness, 2006, etc.) turns his inquisitive eye to the business of work.

For many of us, writes the author, the"unreasonable banality" of work requires"daily submission at the altars of prudence and order," typically housed in drab, soulless workplaces. (The many photographs are striking proof.) From the beginning of his latest philosophical excursion, however, de Botton appreciates that work is a meaningful act, if only in the most elemental sense—workers need to put food on the table. Still, the author found a certain heroic beauty in many of the work environments he visited, including that of an aircraft salesman, a biscuit manufacturer, an electricity-transmission engineer, a career counselor, a painter and an accountant. In each instance, he unhurriedly poked into the workings of the job, examined the possibilities for gleaning pleasure from it and embraced the Protestant worldview that"humility, wisdom, respect, and kindness could be practiced in a shop no less sincerely than in a monastery"—no matter how clownish-looking the activity, especially in an economy increasingly based on satisfying peripheral desires. There is something to be said about the delight generated by an artist's creations, or the happy, heedless energy of entrepreneurs, who require"a painfully uncommon synthesis of imagination and realism." Work may be trivial, de Botton notes, but what's interesting is the determination and gravity we bring to it.

A luminous photo-essay from a consistently fresh and noble writer.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 15, 2009
This exploration of how and why we labor arrives at a poignant time, as global economic turmoil cuts off countless workers from their livelihoodsand the meaning work gives them. Essayist and novelist de Botton ("How Proust Can Change Your Life") spends time with workers in England as well as the United States, including fishermen, rocket scientists, accountants, a landscape painter, and a career counselor, in pursuit of some fundamental truth about work. His conclusion is, perhaps unavoidably, elusive; he variously seems to praise commitment to a task and to deride it, to glorify and to condemn modern industry. De Botton filters his subjects' experiences through his own; though he is a witty, engaging interlocutor, his dominant voice distances the reader from those he aims to portray. Photographer Richard Baker contributes visual images of workers and workplaces, including a photo-essay documenting the process by which a tuna in the Indian Ocean becomes dinner for an English child. Providing provocative insights on specialization and the transitory nature of significance, this is sophisticated reading on a timely subject. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 2/15/09.]Janet Ingraham Dwyer, Worthington Libs., OH

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2009
De Botton is the author ofeight previous books, mostly philosophical essays covering ideas such as love, friendship, architecture, and self-worth, often using the analysis of other thinkers as a guide. Here he travels the globe to examine occupations of the unusual and mundane variety in search of the elusive qualities that cause work to range from delightful to dreadful. Some of the touchstones for this meditation on work include a London biscuit factory, a satellite rocket launch in French Guiana, and a meeting with the Maldives minister of fish while tracing the path of a tuna from net to dinner table. Visits with a painter, accountants, career counselors, and entrepreneurs all help to shed light on 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 principle source of lifes meaning. De Bottons essays reveal the fragile dependencies and interconnectedness that make every one of us a key component of the human network.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)