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	Alain de Botton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Alain de Botton, (born 20 December 1969 in Zurich, Switzerland) is a Swiss-born writer.
		He is the only son of financier Gilbert de Botton and his first wife, Jacqueline Burgauer.
		In The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton attempts to demonstrate how the teachings of philosophers such as Epicurus, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Seneca, and Socrates can be applied to modern everyday woes, such as unpopularity, feelings of inadequacy, financial worries, broken hearts, and the general problem of suffering.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Alain_de_botton (377 words)

	Amazon.co.uk: Status Anxiety: Books: Alain de Botton (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		Alain de Boton is like an incredibly well-read and eloquent participant in a discussion taking place in your head, confirming and developing so many thoughts and ideas that you've always had but are unlikely to have had the chance to ever analyse properly.
		De Botton seems prone to stating the obvious and uses so much quotation that you can forget he is there at all (at one point he repeats the same quotation within two pages).
		It is obvious that Alain de Botton has an enviable understanding of his subject and it was a pleasure for a lazy reader to be guided through such a wide tapestry of thinkers - I have in the past tried to read some of these authors but have been defeated by their verbiage.
	www.amazon.co.uk /Status-Anxiety-Alain-Botton/dp/0241142385 (1879 words)

	Alain de Botton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Alain spent the first twelve years of his life in Switzerland, where he learned to speak French and German.
		De Botton owns his own production company, Seneca Productions, which regularly broadcasts documentaries based on his works.
		Alain de Botton: "Walking down a crowded road as catalyst for fascinating thoughts"
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Alain_de_Botton (377 words)

	Alain de Botton, the architecture of happiness, the consolations of philosophy, how proust can change your life, essays ...
		If you look up Alain de Botton’s internet website (www.alaindebotton.com), you could be forgiven for thinking that his impressive gallery of photographs is a little on the boastful side.
		One living counter-instance of this theory is surely de Botton himself, just 30 years old, with four effortlessly charming books behind him and a style to die for.
		The title of Alain de Botton’s ride through the clouds is taken from the Roman philosopher Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy - not mentioned by de Botton - was a best-seller throughout the Middle Ages, being translated into English by none less than Chaucer.
	www.alaindebotton.com /pages/content/index.asp?PageID=116 (493 words)

	Alain de Botton at the Complete Review
		The fun, and de Botton's great talent, is in the quirky approach he takes and especially the comparisons and connexions he makes.
		De Botton is familiar with a great deal of classical literature and art, but he is also a boy of contemporary pop culture, and he feels comfortable applying either or both, where appropriate (often in places where it might not have occurred to readers that it was appropriate).
		De Botton's books are fairly clever -- and not merely because they (or at least he) give the appearance of being learned, bringing together wise men's words and thoughts from times long past, along with modern commonplaces.
	www.complete-review.com /authors/dbottona.htm (993 words)

	Alain de Botton
		De Botton understands this sense of displacement, but he recognises, too, that the real trouble may lie in the country of the self.
		De Botton often seems unable to enjoy himself no matter where he is. If The Art of Travel is a self-help book - or at least a guide to better living - then it seems the person de Botton is setting out to help is himself.
		De Botton strolls through life, reflecting on his journeys then sharing what he has learnt from his guides.
	www.culturactif.ch /invite/debotton.htm (2986 words)

	8WEEKLY: Alain de Botton (vertaling: Jelle Noorman) - De architectuur van het geluk
		In roerige tijden zullen dus eerder koele strakke gebouwen te zien zijn, zoals bijvoorbeeld het geval was in de jaren twintig waarin in ook de abstracte kunst van bijvoorbeeld Mondriaan werd gemaakt.
		De theorie is interessant, maar doordat De Botton slechts een aantal pagina's aan deze ideeën besteedt, neemt hij geen ruimte voor kritiek op de theorie.
		De Botton neemt niet het startpunt van een architect, of een deskundige, maar probeert als een geïnteresseerde leek nauwkeurig naar gebouwen te kijken en die dingen te beschrijven die hem opvallen, die hij mooi vindt.
	www.8weekly.nl /index.php?art=4272 (1061 words)

	Status Anxiety - Alain de Botton
		Status, Alain de Botton believes, is one of our main and driving preoccupations; indeed, he argues early on in this book that: "Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories": our quest for sexual love, and our quest for love from the world.
		The book is presented in now typical de Botton fashion: very short chapters, well-illustrated (with everything from cartoons to reproductions of classic paintings to print advertisements), and with a few charts and graphs.
		English author Alain de Botton was born in Switzerland in 1969 and educated at Cambridge.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/debotton/statusa.htm (1253 words)

	Amazon.ca: The Art of Travel: Books: Alain de Botton (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		De Botton travels; he discovers some new aspect of gloom; he is bailed out by a well selected item of literature that either makes him feel less alone or shows him the way.
		As is usual with de Botton, his writing is concerned and earnest, a clever fusion of diary-speak and academic engagement.
		De Botton’s style of burying his nose in a book for ideas yields interesting results, but it also closes the windows to the world a little too often.
	www.amazon.ca /Art-Travel-Alain-Botton/dp/0241140102 (1042 words)

	Las Vegas Mercury: Books: Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
		De Botton isn't creating new schools of thought or reinventing any intellectual wheels in his books, but he does provide engaging, plain-language discussions of some fairly brainy subjects.
		De Botton surveys the rise of capitalist culture from the American and French revolutions and serves up an interesting mix of contrasting critical reflections, from Mandeville, Locke, Hume and the Spencerian social Darwinists to the New Testament, De Tocqueville, Ruskin, Marx and Veblen.
		De Botton's approach--collating arguments that should be recognized by most thinking people, supported by the perspectives of canonical Western writers--has earned him the animosity of critics at home in England, where the most insufferable status whores are not the wealthy but the effete, more-literate-than-thou snobs given editorial space in papers like The Guardian.
	www.lasvegasmercury.com /2004/MERC-Jul-08-Thu-2004/24250241.html (554 words)

	Alain de Botton (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		De Botton's affinities are indeed with the Continental, though equally with the Francophile Julian Barnes: as in Flaubert's Parrot, his fiction alternates with offbeat literary criticism, and they of course share a reverence for the consummate prose styles of Flaubert and Proust.
		De Botton offers a smiling photograph of his then girlfriend, who is like 'Albertine' to him, while remarking that author's aunt reminds him of the 'Duchesse de Guermantes'.
		De Botton discourses on travel as a metaphor for life, and about how people could travel more happily, maintaining that many things are 'easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality'.
	www.contemporarywriters.com /authors/?p=auth16 (1360 words)

	DVD Times - Alain de Botton: Status Anxiety
		In the first part, de Botton chooses well in selecting America and examining a society where status anxiety is endemic, finding the root causes and putting them to a number of philosophical and social contexts.
		Nice to see De Botton had a haircut - last time I saw him on TV was the Turner prize where he was trying to create an extreme version of a mullet - very short on top, but extremely shaggy on the lower end.
		The trouble with de Botton is that on the evidence of his books and TV programmes he seems to have no ideas of his own, certainly no good ones, and his analysis of other people's ideas is so feather-lite it barely causes a ripple on the surface of the mind.
	www.dvdtimes.co.uk /content.php?contentid=58202 (2399 words)

	Amazon.ca: On Love: Books: Alain de Botton (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		De Botton's narrator describes falling in love with Chloe, being in love with her, and then getting over her, actually a quite banal thing.
		According to Alain de Botton, there are two ways to understand love: a mystical one, or at least mythical, and a philosophical one.
		Alain de Boton's debut novel is by far and away one of the most perceptive books I've ever read.
	www.amazon.ca /Love-Alain-Botton/dp/0802134092 (1416 words)

	The Best Reviews: Alain De Botton
		Alain de Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland in December 1969 and educated in Switzerland and England.
		They left in 1492, along with the rest of the Sephardic Jewish community, and eventually settled in Alexandria, Egypt, where de Botton's father was born.
		Alain de Botton's newest book, The Art of Travel, was published in the spring of 2002.
	www.thebestreviews.com /author2045 (224 words)

	Hexapedia - Alain de Botton (via CobWeb/3.1 planet03.csc.ncsu.edu) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		Alain de Botton, born in Switzerland in 1969, is a London-based writer.
		The title is a reference to Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, in which philosophy appears as an allegorical figure to Boethius to offer him consolation before he faces his impending execution.
		In The Consolations of Philosophy Alain attempts to show how the teachings of Philosophers such as Socrates, Epicurus, Nietzsche, Montaigne, and Schopenhauer can be applied to everyday woes such as unpopularity, feelings of inadequacy, to financial worries, having a broken heart and the general problem of suffering.
	www.hexafind.com.cob-web.org:8888 /encyclopedia/Alain_de_Botton (193 words)

	AbeBooks: Alain de Botton
		Alain de Botton’s career has been spent writing books that tackle questions of everyday life.
		De Botton has also written two books which deal directly with the thoughts of other people: How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy.
		In his latest book, Status Anxiety, de Botton looked at an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser.
	www.abebooks.co.uk /docs/Community/Featured/alaindeBotton.shtml (339 words)

	Barnes & Noble.com - Books: How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton, Paperback
		At the beginning, when de Botton drags his own girlfriend into a tortuous and not terribly successful digression, readers may be skeptical, but they will be won over by his whimsical relation of Proust's lessons-essentially an exhortation to slow down, pay attention and learn from life.
		De Botton might not make us better people (he quotes the perennially miserable Proust on love in a Q-and-A format: "how to be happy in love"), but he will make us more careful readers.
		De Botton even turns up a gem of Proust's miscellaneous criticism in an essay on the artist Chardin, whose closely observed paintings of ordinary people and objects Proust recommends as an aesthetic tonic to an imaginary depressed "young man of limited means and artistic tastes." Elsewhere de Botton discusses the hang-ups of Proust's characters Mme.
	search.barnesandnoble.com /booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=0679779159&itm=1 (777 words)

	McClelland.com \| Books \| The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton
		Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness.
		With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks.
		In February 2003, de Botton was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest artistic honours.
	www.mcclelland.com /catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780771026027&veiw=oonline (725 words)

	Review \| Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
		According to Alain de Botton, we are looking for love; specifically, we desire the feelings of significance, acumen and achievement that are supposedly conferred by the ability to rent a room in a five-star hotel.
		As de Botton puts it; "…we may fail due to stupidity or an absence of self-knowledge, macro-economics or malevolence." We are prey, in other words, to status anxiety.
		In a chapter on art, de Botton writes: "Paintings too can challenge the world's normal understanding of who and what is important." This is hopelessly naïve; no other area of activity is more prone to spurious trend setting and the fear of being out of fashion.
	www.januarymagazine.com /nonfiction/statusanxiety.html (576 words)

	Essays in Love (On Love) - Alain de Botton (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		De Botton's narrator describes falling in love with Chloe, being in love with her, and then getting over her.
		De Botton is intelligent, and he chooses to approach his book cleverly.
		The almost banal affair itself does stifle the narrative (De Botton's strength is certainly essayistic, which is why his Proust book is far superior to the novels), but there are enough well-conceived flights of fancy to keep the reader amused.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/debotton/onlove.htm (903 words)

	channel4.com Status Anxiety
		In this two-hour programme, as well as testing his theory in Britain, De Botton travels to the United States, to investigate status anxiety, asking why people are unable to curtail their painful aspirations and whether those at the bottom of society merit their position there as much as those at the top do theirs.
		As well as examining the work of classical philosophers, de Botton develops his theory with the help of a Washington DC restaurant manager who considers himself destined to become a chat show host; motivational speaker Les Brown; homeless lady Jenny Lamont; and members of the Native American population.
		De Botton's search for possible cures to status anxiety takes him to churches on both sides of the Atlantic; the bohemian world of punks, nudists and hippies who live by their own rules; and philosophers - such as Schopenhauer - who believe that other people's opinions are not always worthwhile.
	www.channel4.com /life/microsites/S/status_anxiety (227 words)

	Writerspace Interview with Alain de Botton
		Alain: I was born in Switzerland in 1969, spoke French for the first 12 years, then switched to English.
		Alain: I've never travelled that much, but I do remember that from the age of 10 or 11, I was fascinated by the mechanics of travel.
		Alain: I'd like to be remembered as someone who had a shot at trying out a kind of essayistic writing, which blended the personal and the philosophical, in search of practical answers for how to deal with the problems of everyday life.
	www.writerspace.com /interviews/botton1002.html (999 words)

	Alain de Botton CV at PFD
		In February 2003 he was made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, on of France's highest artistic honours; in November of the same year, he was awarded the Prix Europeen de l'Essai Charles Veillon.
		Alain de Botton has set six of the finest minds in the history of philosophy to work on the problems of everyday life.
		In this book, Alain de Botton creates a distillation of Proust's life which provides a view of the author, an interpretation of "In Search of Lost Time" and an exercise in literary criticism.
	www.pfd.co.uk /clients/bottonad/b-aut.html (450 words)

	Flak Magazine: Review of Status Anxiety, 07.28.04
		De Botton returns to this well-plowed field in his new book, "Status Anxiety," where he dissects, in typically broad fashion, a straightforward but stubborn problem: our need to be loved.
		De Botton differs from the doyens of cultural decline because he is shy enough not to ask big questions with a straight face, and bold enough to treat seemingly small matters as if they were big ones.
		De Botton gallops through the anxieties of modern Western citizens — think the upwardly mobile cast of urbane professionals in Love Actually — alighting on a few salient categories: lovelessness, expectation, meritocracy, snobbery and dependence.
	www.flakmag.com /books/statanx.html (1056 words)

	Amazon.com: Status Anxiety: Books: Alain de Botton (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-09)
		De Botton’s trademark erudition is the foundation for his road map, and he spares no literary reference towards the goal of enlightening his audience.
		First, AdB begins by claiming that it's human nature that we want to be a "somebody" rather than a "nobody," and to rise rather than fall or remain at too modest a rung on the social latter.
		De Botton looks back at a time long ago when peasants led a far harsher existence in material terms, but rarely worried that their difficulties were "their own fault." Thus had God made the world, and such were the affairs of men supposed to be.
	www.amazon.com /Status-Anxiety-Alain-Botton/dp/0375420835 (2988 words)

	Books \| Everyman's pocket thinker
		Alain de Botton, distiller of droplets of culture for general edification, has a new subject, which he explores in a book and an accompanying Channel 4 documentary, both called Status Anxiety (Viking £16.99, pp340).
		(De Botton sees himself as not unlike Adam Phillips here, a writer he admires.) This style seems particularly effective for subjects that aren't usually subject to serious intellectual rigour, such as travel, or, in the case of de Botton's next book, architecture.
		This is not meant to imply that de Botton is lightweight, nor that he bastardises or diminishes thought by writing in a fragmentary way.
	books.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,4869188-99939,00.html (972 words)

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