About this item
"Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted. . . . The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first."This is a book about 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. This is a book about status anxiety.Alain de Botton, best-selling author of The Consolations of Philosophy and The Art of Travel, asks - with lucidity and charm - where our worries about status come from and what, if anything, we can do to surmount them.
About the Author
Alain de Botton is a writer and television producer who lives in London and aims to make philosophy relevant to everyday life. He can be contacted by email directly via He is a writer of essayistic books, which refer both to his own experiences and ideas- and those of artists, philosophers and thinkers. It's a style of writing that has been termed a 'philosophy of everyday life. 'His first book, Essays in Love [titled On Love in the US], minutely analysed the process of falling in and out of love. The style of the book was unusual, because it mixed elements of a novel together with reflections and analyses normally found in a piece of non-fiction. It's a book of which many readers are still fondest. Bibliography:* Essays In Love (1993) * The Romantic Movement (1994) * Kiss and Tell (1995) * How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997) * The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) * The Art of Travel (2002) * Status Anxiety (2004) * The Architecture of Happiness (2006) * The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)
