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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.36
EAN: 9780375424441
ISBN: 037542444X
Label: Pantheon
Manufacturer: Pantheon
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: June 02, 2009
Publisher: Pantheon
Release Date: June 02, 2009
Studio: Pantheon
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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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I purchased this book after reading Alain's travel book, which I liked very much. This book and its subject matter on the other hand has left me in desire of rescue. In his analyses of the several different occupations, there is too much rote mechanics of the tasks, only sparsely interspersed with his philosophical insights. Over and over I have found the text mundane and banal, with droll resuscitations on the people and theirs situations he encounters. It almost seems as if his philosophy is shoe-horned into the text. I felt as if the title began to apply to my reading of the book, with some pleasures matched with by the sorrows of working to finish it. Not recommend to buy; this is a library book.
Rating:  -
I'm not sure what I was expecting when I purchased this book at a small shop in Key West, FL. Perhaps I thought "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work" would provide a trenchant view of the state of modern-day work or give a unique window on work experiences like Studs Terkel's groundbreaking book of oral histories "Working." Instead, it felt like Botton had lined up a set of unrelated excursions to work environments that were simply published in book form, lacking any coherency.
In each of the book's ten chapters (ranging from Cargo Shipping to Aviation), Bottton goes on site and takes us through the often hidden aspects of how an industry operates. One of the chapters, called Career Counseling, seems out of place and describes the practice of a struggling vocational counselor and motivational speaker. Part of the incoherence of the book is how this chapter just seems tossed in.
Botton is a perceptive person and a skilled writer. He often heightens the enjoyment of reading about rather dull enterprises with his philosophical observations. He did some extensive research, such as in the chapter on Logistics where he literally follows the journey of a tuna from the sea to a boy's dinner plate, describing the complex processes along the way. But for a book on the pleasures and sorrows of work, Botton seldom provides any in-depth material from those working in these industries. Instead, he gives us his observations of how these businesses operate and what he imagines people are experiencing.
I enjoyed most the chapter on Accountancy when Botton spent time at the sleek, modern London headquarters of the Ernst & Young accounting firm. Typical of Botton's wry observations is this one about one of the employees: "She had a business card which she hands over in meetings and which tells other people--and more meaningfully perhaps, reminds her--that she is a Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness in an incidental universe."
For all that you learn about obscure industries and for all of Botton's wit, this book is still a hodepodge. One wonders if Botton had written a book on the joys and sorrows of marriage, for example, if he would have hung out at a few dinner parties and then strung his observations along in book form, much as he did here.
Rating: -
I have read a couple of books by Alain. My favourite, Status Anxiety, was by far his best work. Pleasures and Sorrows of work is a somewhat drawn out affair, thin on content. He could have completed the objectives he sets out in his book in half the pages.
He does write well, and if you like wordy, descriptive stories about his experiences while investigating the working lives of a range of people in various industries and cultures, then you may get more out of it than I did. I didn't find any amazing revelations that changed my life and perception to work. But you might.
Rating:  -
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is the right book for the right time. Unless you're a government-financed financier or tenured bureaucrat, you know scads of people who held decent jobs until the recent misfortunes. This book provides a brilliant opportunity to re-examine our lives while on sabbatical.
Two characteristics of Pleasures and Sorrows jump off the pages: first, that de Botton rains pithy observations. For instance, he answers the question, "When does a job feel meaningful?" with "Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others." Where other writers would waste a book, de Botton codifies a useful truth in twelve words.
Second, de Botton is laugh-out-loud funny in the style of Mark Twain. For instance, he sets up the moral dilemma of Mexican thieves robbing Nikes made in Vietnam from trains in the California desert. Of a local newspaper article that shows little sympathy for thieves who die in the process, de Botton writes, "Decidedly unmoved and vengeful in tone, it appeared to be squarely on the side of the shoes." Suddenly, we must weigh a human life against running shoes strewn in the desert, and it is absurdly funny. His asides and comic setups - especially his soliloquy on ruined airplanes to a watchman - are exquisite.
Some critics have described de Botton's viewpoint as condescending or mocking. I can only imagine that these critics have never visited a business, or actually tried very hard to do anything, or simply feel a reflexive need to defend jobs generally. de Botton has more compassion than almost anyone I have actually met in business: you can experience this in his TED Global Talk online on "A Gentler, Kinder Philosophy of Success." In it, he makes important distinctions between Victorian "unfortunates" and modern "losers," between the iron-clad belief that if we only believed harder and worked harder, we could be Oprah, and the more often operative and sadly accepted corollary that we are the masters of our own failures.
de Botton is sensitive to the needs of survival, but he also points out the bathos of our well rationalized, higher functioning jobs. Every generation is in a hurry to change the world; we love our computers and pod players today, but they will be as interesting as the world-changing steam engine in another generation. We are distracted from other thoughts by our work, and Pleasures and Sorrows helps us reflect on deeper meanings.
I have purchased two more copies of this book to give to friends who think carefully about the relationship of their work to their lives, and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in how the world works. For me, de Botton's insights and humor were delightful. This book was a pleasure to read and a sorrow to finish.
Rating: -
We spend most of our lives at work - yet the modern workplace is fraught with perils psychological and moral. Philosophy blends with humor in this survey of occupations ranging from biscuit manufacture to accountancy, searching out what makes jobs either satisfying or soul-destroying. 'What makes work pleasurable' is only one of the discussions in a book recommended for both business and general lending libraries.
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