The Art of Travel
February 8, 2010 by admin
Filed under Travel Tips
- ISBN13: 9780375725340
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow.
Even as de Botton takes the reader along on his own peregrinations, he also cites such d… More >>
This book was a tiring read. I struggled to get through it. Only one chapter was remotely interesting and thought provoking. The rest was self serving drivel. If you need a book to put you to sleep on a plane or train, this could be it.
Rating: 1 / 5
I wanted to point possible purchasers of this book to a fantastic review in the London Review of Books August 22, 2002. Christopher Tayler has some powerful insights into the author’s style and motivation.
Rating: 1 / 5
If you want your travels informed by head-up-the-wazoo literary pretension, this milquetoast is your man. Excerpt: “The result was a rich green foliage in an almost perfect circle, like an archetypal tree drawn by a child.” No matter where this guy goes, he harks back only to his library and museum-dwelling. There is a dearth of first-person social interaction described in any locale of which he writes. Read travel books instead by those who can soak up the local color, and interact with real people, and be transformed by the experience. This guy could ruin any trip.
Rating: 2 / 5
this is an entertaining adventure where mr de botton does a lot of physical travelling and shares some of his literary travelling with us.
his conclusions are of a buddhist nature . our states of mind control how we react to a given landscape , whether its the sinai desert or our own bedroom .
i think mr de botton would find basic buddhist instruction very helpful . he seems genuinely baffled that he is not able to enjoy as he had expected, the natural beauty of his experience in the Bahamas for instance, because of a minor altercation with his partner . do not seek happiness elsewhere for it does not exist , if u are not at peace with yourself.
an annoying dictum perhaps, but no less true.
i would be interested to hear from other readers who may or may not agree with me.
Rating: 4 / 5
De Botton’s goal is to expand the observation skills of his readers. He attempts to reach this goal through shared experiences of his own, coupled with historical analyses from other travelers from myriad times and places. His chapter on Van Gogh’s Provence illustrates his approach. He uses correspondence between Vincent and his brother to establish the time and setting of the artist’s more productive years. Readers are taken on something of a falshback as de Botton intersperses his own travel writing with that of the historical figures cited by him. He makes a valid point in describing the perception Alexander von Humboldt experienced as contrasted with a 21st century traveler. Humboldt was acquiring raw data and correcting misconceptions on his travels, whereas the contemporary traveler is biased in perception due to tour guides and promotional hype which package what is considered to be worthy of attention.
My major complaint about de Botton’s book is that we don’t share the same philosophical assumptions and some of his reflections are sermons for cynicism and fatalism although he sees himself as an advocate of freedom of thought. There’s an uneasy subtext of fatalism in some of his observations and he seems blind to this fact. His interpretation of Scripture is not from a Christian perspective. So with that serious flaw identified, one can take the book for what it is, a thought provoking work that attempts to get a travler to look inward before seeking external stimulation.
Rating: 3 / 5