Volume 54, Number 4 · March 15, 2007
When Is a Building Beautiful?
By Alison Lurie
The Architecture of Happiness
by Alain de Botton
Pantheon, 280 pp., $25.00
The Art of Travel
by Alain de Botton
Vintage, 272 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Consolations of Philosophy
by Alain de Botton
Vintage, 265 pp., $13.95 (paper)
How Proust Can Change Your Life
by Alain de Botton
Vintage, 197 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping and the Novel
by Alain de Botton
Picador, 326 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions
by Deborah Cohen
Yale University Press, 296 pp., $40.00
Today we expect nonfiction to be either comic or somber: to make us laugh, or to inform us, warn us, or terrify us with accounts of miserable childhoods or natural and political disasters. The idea that prose might be both casual in manner and serious in intent is almost forgotten. It survives, however, in the work of Alain de Botton. In the last decade he has considered—in books whose brevity and informal tone disguise the occasional gravity of their content—travel, love, literature, philosophy, and the value of reading. His best-known work, How Proust Can Change Your Life, is accurately described on its flyleaf as both a perceptive literary biography and a self-help manual.
Review, 3353 words
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