Combining narrative virtuosity, a scholar's grasp of history, an intellectual intrepidness, and a dazzling ability to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary (and vice versa), Alain de Botton has created his own ever-surprising genre into which The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work fits brilliantly.

In this tantalizing new book, Alain de Botton takes on an activity common to us all--the activity in

which most of us spend the majority of our time, but which rarely gets serious attention beyond the realm of cartoons and television sitcoms. With his signature elan and expansive curiosity, de Botton explores a diversity of occupations--from accountant to aircraft salesman, painter to power-station designer, career counselor to cookie manufacturer--and the vast diversity of locations where these occupations are undertaken. Peering closely at details of the workday and workplace that we tend to overlook, and asking questions that we hesitate to ask ourselves (To what end do we exhaust ourselves on a daily basis? What makes work pleasurable? Why isn't it pleasurable when it isn't?), de Botton gets at the whys and wherefores of routine, practice, and process, focusing a new and unexpectedly revealing light on the essential meaning of work in our lives.

"This pensive study explores work not as an economic or sociological phenomenon but as an existential predicament. Observing an eclectic sample of workers, from fishermen to a CEO of an accounting firm, de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life) counterposes 'the expansive intelligence' embodied in vast business organizations with the blinkered routines of their human cogs and finds that tension rife with philosophical conundrums. Cookie marketers illustrate the link between happiness and triviality in bourgeois society; office drones wear 'a mask of shallow cheerfulness' over 'the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues'; a visit to a satellite launch center contrasts the restrained self-effacement of rocket scientists with their power to 'upstage the gods' during fiery blastoffs. De Botton's humanism recoils at the banality, crassness and forced optimism of the business mindset, but he admires its ability to construct the world — and even finds poetry in a supermarket supply chain that flies 'blood-red strawberries... over the Arctic Circle by moonlight, leaving a trail of nitrous oxide across a black and gold sky.' (The book includes evocative photos of commercial and industrial sites.) De Botton's sprightly mix of reportage and rumination expands beyond the workplace to investigate the broader meaning of life. (June 2)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Although I am a thoroughgoing information-age worker — freelance writer, blogger — some of my most satisfying work in recent years has had nothing to do with my profession. I'm thinking, for example, of the weeks I spent replacing some decrepit iron pipes in the basement. Who knew plumbing could be such an intellectual puzzle (misroute the vents, flood the house with noxious gas) or that looking... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) at plastic pipes that I had cut, fitted and glued myself could fill me with such pride?

What makes work meaningful? What kind of labor, whether for oneself or another, helps to make us complete (or saps our life)? These are the sorts of questions that first-time author Matthew B. Crawford, who runs a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond and also has a Ph.D. in political philosophy, explores in "Shop Class as Soulcraft." And they are the issues examined from a quite different vantage point by Alain de Botton, in "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work."

For those who don't know de Botton's books, the author of the best-selling "Architecture of Happiness" is a writer of long, elegant sentences and Anglo wit. Forever flirting with preciousness, he is rescued from it 87 percent of the time by his intelligence. He is not a reporter (though he reports) so much as a marvelous muser. Yet Crawford's is the better, if lumpier, text. It's the one that may upend your preconceptions about labor and, just maybe, cause you to rethink your career (or how you spend your weekends).

De Botton, for his part, says that his goal is to create a textual version of "one of those eighteenth-century cityscapes which show us people at work from the quayside to the temple," but it's even more idiosyncratic than that. The book begins with him gazing at a brontosaurian ship lumbering up the Thames, laden with consumer goods. Why, he asks, do so many of us dismiss or ignore the endeavors and networks that provide the goods that feed our material appetites?

De Botton sets out to remedy our ignorance with a series of set pieces. He flies to the Maldives and watches fishermen hook and bloodily bludgeon salmon in the Indian Ocean. Then he gets on a plane with the fish. Some 60 hours after the salmon emerged from the "aphotic brine," one of them is on the dinner table of a family in Bristol, England. Moving on, de Botton tours the headquarters of a cookie factory, marveling at the people who spend their days deciding which name ("Moments"? "Le Petit Ecolier"?), font and image will most effectively seduce harried moms at supermarkets.

Baking cookies is, in itself, noble work. But can it still be so, de Botton asks, after the activity "has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen manufacturing sites"? (He rarely pursues such thoughts beyond the initial apercu.) He also tracks the typical day of a London accountant and, for some reason, follows around a guy who is obsessed with electrical towers. At this point, our intrepid flaneur seems to have lost the thread.

Crawford's book, on the other hand, is rooted in a gobsmackingly unique resume. Along the way to a degree in physics at UC Santa Barbara, he earned money as an electrician and picked up the skills of a gearhead (bikes, VW's), before proceeding to fall in love with Greek philosophy. He earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago. Then, during a dispiriting job search, he fell back on his first passion: tearing down and rebuilding a 1975 Honda two-wheeler in the basement of his apartment building. After an unsatisfying stint at a think tank in Washington, D.C., he founded Shockoe Moto, in Richmond, where he now enjoys a rich work life.

Educators and policymakers have made some basic philosophical and economic errors in their thinking about the labor market, Crawford argues. Shop classes, once a staple of the curriculum, have been shuttered as school boards bloviate about preparing kids for a "global future." One assumption is that blue-collar work is dying. That's undeniable in certain sectors (think Chrysler assembly lines), but some top economists now argue that skilled tradesman may actually be shielded from globalization. Someone in South Asia can read your CAT scan; she can't fix your Subaru. Moreover, Crawford says, if more elites understood the intellectual richness of mechanical work, they would feel no guilt about encouraging young people to pursue it, either in lieu of college or as a supplement. The philosopher Alexandre Kojeve has written: "The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it." That might describe a motorcycle mechanic. But a middle manager?

Crawford, who appears to be temperamentally conservative (he rejects the Zen approach to motorcycle repair, he reports, in favor of one that features prolific cursing), says it's time to revisit Marx's concept of the alienation of labor. Assembly lines once robbed workers of their sense of ownership of their work. But now even white-collar workers increasingly toil in environments that offer few chances to show objective skill (done with that TPS report yet?). The trades offer an escape route from alienating ways of living.

I've focused on his arguments, but Crawford also offers narrative descriptions of some of his obsessive repair projects — including cameos by a parade of interesting dudes — which make concrete his themes. The book's not perfect. Crawford's tone can be aggressively male: There are few or no women in the shops he describes, crude sexual banter is portrayed as intrinsic to a mechanic's life, and he bitterly refers to "harpies" during his discussion of his academic sojourn. But at its best, the book is both impassioned and profound.

What about us weekend handymen? In response to economists who recommend that white-collar workers avoid painting their houses or fixing their cars — the math says you should pay someone else — Crawford offers this retort: "To fix one's own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one's car, and of oneself."

OK, maybe the guy has some Zen in him after all.

Christopher Shea writes the Brainiac blog and column for the Boston Globe.

Reviewed by Christopher Shea, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

De Botton is an author of both fiction and non-fiction who has employed a philosophical perspective in this volume to discuss "the joys and perils of the modern workplace." Written for general readers, this volume examines a wide variety of occupations in the fields of art, finance, manufacturing, aviation and science to uncover what makes employment either fulfilling or "soul-destroying." Black-and-white photographs by Richard Baker provide an interesting counterpoint to the text. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Peering closely at details of the workday and workplace, de Botton gets at the whys and wherefores of routine, practice, and process, focusing a new and unexpectedly revealing light on the essential meaning of work.

We spend most of our waking lives at work-in occupations often chosen by our unthinking younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully evoking what other people wake up to do each day-and night-to make the frenzied contemporary world function. With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art-in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.

Along the way he tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can ask about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? And why do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also the planet? Characteristically lucid, witty and inventive, Alain de Botton's song for occupations is a celebration and exploration of an aspect of life which is all too often ignored and a book that shines a revealing light on the essential meaning of work in our lives.