In Ancient Greece or Rome, philosophers were seen as natural authorities on the most pressing questions. However, since then, the idea of finding wisdom from philosophy has come to seem bizarre. Enter a university department today and ask to...
The starting point of How Proust can change your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than life-transforming. This is an unusual claim: our education system, while stressing that novels are highly worthwhile, rarely investigates why...
We all spend longer than we would like waiting around in airports, but we rarely discover anything about our fellow travellers or those who work there.
In the summer of 2009, however, Alain de Botton was given unprecedented, unrestricted access...
Essays in Love is a novel about two young people, who meet on an airplane between London and Paris and rapidly fall in love. The structure of the story isn’t unusual, but what lends the book its interest is the extraordinary depth with which the...
Acclaim for Alain de Botton's
THE ART OF TRAVEL
“[Refreshing and profoundly readable. … Thanks to de Botton's detailed and thoughtful writing, coupled with his clever curiosity, The Art of Travel hzs the potential to enrich not only our...
Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner—in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been...
Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that...
In this lively and colorful book of popular history, journalist Betsy Israel shines a light on the old stereotypes that have stigmatized single women for years and celebrates their resourceful sense of spirit, enterprise, and unlimited success in...