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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.
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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.
Rating:  -
Rarely such simple and elegant prose, since Hemingway, maybe. But more interesting is how he labels a topic and defies expectations by carrying the reader to surprising and very interesting aspects.
Roger McMillan
Rating:  -
This book's title is way too grandiose for the material it covers, and its approach to its subject matter is haphazard and not very deep. There are a few moments of insight, but there are many more of disingenuousness and intellectual posturing and making too much out of too little. No question de Botton is an accomplished prose stylist, but the pleasure one ought to take in his writing is significantly marred by his too frequent reliance on style rather than substance to carry the essays in this book. And the photographs, which are supposed to enrich the text, are, with one or two exceptions, utterly uninspiring. The only chapters worth one's time are "Logistics," "Career Counseling" and "Accounting," and they can be read through in a couple of hours at the library.
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