Status Anxiety (First Edition in Dust Jacket, Like New) - Hardcover

De Botton, Alain

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670044679 ISBN 13: 9780670044672

Publisher: Pantheon Books, 2004

Synopsis

There are few more powerful desires than the wish to be thought of as a success, worthy of dignity and respect. We long for status and dread its opposite. But such aspirations and anxieties are rarely spoken about -- or at least not without sarcasm, embarrassment or condemnation. In STATUS ANXIETY, Alain de Botton asks where our worries about questions of status come from and what, if anything, we can do to reduce them. Looking at how people have coped with these anxieties in the past, and appealing to philosophers, historians, politicians and artists, de Botton brings status anxiety out into the open with a range of unexpected examples and entertaining anecdotes.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Anyone who's ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor's Lexus had better read Alain de Botton's irresistibly clear-headed new book, immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents turns his attention to the insatiable quest for status, a quest that has less to do with material comfort than with love. To demonstrate his thesis, de Botton ranges through Western history and thought from St. Augustine to Andrew Carnegie and Machiavelli to Anthony Robbins.
Whether it's assessing the class-consciousness of Christianity or the convulsions of consumer capitalism, dueling or home-furnishing, Status Anxiety is infallibly entertaining. And when it examines the virtues of informed misanthropy, art appreciation, or walking a lobster on a leash, it is not only wise but helpful.

About the Author:

Alain de Botton is the author of Essays in Love, The Romantic Movement, Kiss and Tell, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel, Status Anxiety, The Architecture of Happiness, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, A Week at the Airport, Religion for Atheists, The News: A User's Manual, and latest novel The Course of Love, among many others. Alain is a bestselling author in 30 countries. He lives in London, where he runs The School of Life and Living Architecture.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0670044679
• ISBN 13: 9780670044672
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336