Status anxiety / Alain de Botton.
Publisher: London : Penguin, 2005, c2004Description: 314 p. : ill., facsims., ports. ; 20 cm001: 016108805ISBN: 9780141014869 (pbk.); 0141014865 (pbk.)Subject(s): Social status | Social psychologyDDC classification: 158.2Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | MAIN LIBRARY Book | 158.2 DEB (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 112218 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
We all worry about what others think of us. We all long to succeed and fear failure. We all suffer - to a greater or lesser degree, usually privately and with embarrassment - from status anxiety.
For the first time, Alain de Botton gives a name to this universal condition and sets out to investigate both its origins and possible solutions. He looks at history, philosophy, economics, art and politics - and reveals the many ingenious ways that great minds have overcome their worries. The result is a book that is not only entertaining and thought-provoking - but genuinely wise and helpful as well.
Originally published: London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004.
Includes index.
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Why we all want to be top dog; from a French philosopher, who's doing a seven-city author tour (just for status?). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.Publishers Weekly Review
This sophisticated gazebo of a book is the latest dispatch from the Swiss-born, London-based author of the influential handbook How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel (1997). Promising to teach us how to duck the "brutal epithet of `loser' or `nobody,' " de Botton notes that status has often been conflated with honor and that the number of men slain while dueling has amounted, over the centuries, to the hundreds of thousands. That conflation is a trap from which de Botton suggests a number of escape routes. We could try philosophy, the "intelligent misanthropy" of Schopenhauer, for who cares what others think if they're all a pack of ninnies anyhow? Art, too, has its consolations, as Marcel found out in Remembrance of Things Past. A novelist such as Jane Austen, with her little painted squares of ivory, can reimagine the world we live in so that we see fully how virtue is actually "distributed without regard to material wealth." De Botton also discusses bohemia, the reaction to status and the attack on bourgeois values, wisely linking this movement to dadaism, whose founder, Tristan Tzara, called for the "idiotic." The phenomenon known as "keeping up with the Joneses" is nothing new, and not much has changed in the 45 years since the late Vance Packard, in The Status Seekers, wrote the definitive analysis of consumer culture and its discontents. But even at the peak of his influence, Packard was never half as suave as de Botton. (A three-part TV documentary, to be shown in the U.K. and in Australia, and hosted by de Botton, has been commissioned to promote the book.) Lively and provocative, de Botton proves once again that originality isn't necessary when one has that continental flair we call "style." Agent, Nicole Aragi. (June 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reservedKirkus Book Review
A novelist (Kiss and Tell, 1996, etc.) with a flair for gleaning self-help from across the ages (The Consolations of Philosophy, 2000) cleverly deconstructs and demystifies that sinking feeling of material inferiority. First of all, the author insists, this is not all our fault. For almost two millennia society actually celebrated the poor who were--fortunately for society--locked down in place on the agrarian, feudal landscape doing its dirtiest and most essential jobs. Comes industry, capitalism, and upward mobility, and suddenly it's the rich who dominate the "meritocracy" they rigged in the first place based on the constant that society is more likely to reward the appearance of merit than merit itself. While defining the toll taken on the human psyche by constant uncertainty of where one stands or is trending, de Botton amusingly stresses that the real problem is the presumed need to find external reflections of one's own self-worth. In a historic breakout, he notes, hundreds of thousands of Europeans died in duels attempting to either retain or regain sense of self as affirmed in the opinions of others: "In Paris in 1678, for example, one man killed another who had said his apartment was tasteless; in Florence in 1702 a literary man took the life of a cousin who had accused him of not understanding Dante." The problem posed, the author commences potential solutions with the idea of settling into a stance of "intelligent misanthropy" as adopted by some of the greatest philosophers in the Western tradition, which is free of both defensiveness and pride. (A key adjunct: public opinion, as such, is rarely rational, therefore hardly worth a damn.) He waxes more eloquent, however, in proposing that art--novels, paintings, songs, films--has the capacity, through both laughter and tears, to "rebalance one's moral perspective," while citing (monochrome illustrations throughout) a number of thought-provoking examples. An intelligent breath of fresh air, sans the usual ax-grinding. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.There are no comments on this title.