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The Art of Travel
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Categories: Politics & Social Sciences, Philosophy
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Prose at its most elegant, beautifully performed
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The Consolations of Philosophy
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In ancient Greece or Rome, philosophers were seen as natural authorities on the most pressing questions. However, since then, the idea of finding wisdom from philosophy has come to seem bizarre. Enter a university department today and ask to study wisdom, and you will politely but firmly be shown the door. The Consolations of Philosophy sets out to refute the notion that good philosophy must be irrelevant and gathers together six great philosophers who were convinced of the power of philosophical insight to work a practical effect on our lives.
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Hugely entertaining!!
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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.
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Talking about taboos
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Don't 'read' when your heart is breaking
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On Confidence
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We spend vast amounts of time acquiring confidence in narrow technical fields: quadratic equations or bioengineering; economics or pole vaulting. But we overlook the primordial need to acquire a more free-ranging variety of confidence - one that can serve us across a range of tasks: speaking to strangers at parties, asking someone to marry us, suggesting a fellow passenger turn down their music, changing the world. This is a guidebook to confidence, why we lack it and how we can acquire more of it in our lives.
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The Consolations of Philosophy
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In ancient Greece or Rome, philosophers were seen as natural authorities on the most pressing questions. However, since then, the idea of finding wisdom from philosophy has come to seem bizarre. Enter a university department today and ask to study wisdom, and you will politely but firmly be shown the door. The Consolations of Philosophy sets out to refute the notion that good philosophy must be irrelevant and gathers together six great philosophers who were convinced of the power of philosophical insight to work a practical effect on our lives.
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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.
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Talking about taboos
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Don't 'read' when your heart is breaking
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At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily - it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question their friends never ask: what happened next? Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact it is only the beginning.
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Sublime
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We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day, writes Alain de Botton (author of the best-selling The Architecture of Happiness), but this has a huge impact on our sense of what matters and of how we should lead our lives. In his dazzling new book, de Botton takes twenty-five archetypal news stories - including an airplane crash, a murder, a celebrity interview and a political scandal - and submits them to unusually intense analysis with a view to helping us navigate our news-soaked age.
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In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: "Know yourself". Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who we are that we can make reliable decisions - particularly around love and work. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly.
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Words flowed like water flows in a river.
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This is an audiobook about everything you were never taught at school. It's about how to understand your emotions, find and sustain love, succeed in your career, fail well and overcome shame and guilt. It's also about letting go of the myth of a perfect life in order to achieve genuine emotional maturity. Written in a hugely accessible, warm and humane style, The School of Life is the ultimate guide to the emotionally fulfilled lives we all long for - and deserve.
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More Alain needed....
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Around the World in 80 Trains
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When Monisha Rajesh announced plans to circumnavigate the globe in 80 train journeys, she was met with wide-eyed disbelief. But it wasn’t long before she was carefully plotting a route that would cover 45,000 miles - almost twice the circumference of the earth - coasting along the world’s most remarkable railways; from the cloud-skimming heights of Tibet’s Qinghai railway to silk-sheeted splendour on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. Packing up her rucksack - and her fiancé, Jem, Monisha embarks on an unforgettable adventure.
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Interesting but obnoxious
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Alain de Botton believes that philosophy can help people enjoy happier lives. And in his numerous best sellers, from Status Anxiety to The Art of Travel, his unique blend of erudition and self-help has reached an audience eager to listen. In On Seeing and Noticing, Alain de Botton takes everyday concerns such as expressing sadness or being romantic and dispenses advice and observations based on the works of some of history's greatest writers, artists and thinkers.
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Religion for Atheists
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The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain de Botton's inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false - and yet that religions still have important things to teach the secular world.
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Didn't hold my attention
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A Literary Christmas
- By: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, and others
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Read by Juliet Stevenson and Simon Callow, A Literary Christmas is a seasonal anthology that collects together poems, short stories, and prose extracts by some of the greatest poets and writers in the English language. Like Charles Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, they are representative of times old and new - from John Donne’s Elizabethan hymn over the baby Jesus to Rudyard Kipling’s "Christmas in India", from Thomas Tusser counting the cost of a Tudor feast to Laurie Lee’s "Cider with Rosie".
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Wonderful for Christmas
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The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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We spend most of our waking lives at work - in occupations often chosen by our unthinking 16-year-old selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what it might mean for us. Equally intrigued by work's pleasures and its pains, Alain de Botton heads into the office, the factory, the fishing fleet, and the logistics centre, ears and eyes open to the beauty, interest, and sheer strangeness of the modern workplace. Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? And why do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also the planet?
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This book is a poem
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Vagabonding
- An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
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Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life - from six weeks to four months to two years - to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel.
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A great listen.
- By Anthony Sephton on 20-12-16
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On Photography
- By: Susan Sontag
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First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images, which are continually inserted between experience and reality. When anything can be photographed, and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely, with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, with the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.
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hard going
- By Paul on 04-09-13
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The Romantic Movement
- Sex, Shopping and the Novel
- By: Alain de Botton
- Narrated by: Nicholas Bell
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Romantic Movement, Alain de Botton explores the progress of a love affair from first meeting to breaking up, intercut with musings on the nature of art of love. The relationship between Alice, an advertising executive, and Eric, a banker, is examined at every stage, supplemented by quizzes and commentary by a chorus of great philosophers, from Descartes to Plato to Aretha Franklin. The Romantic Movement will charm listeners and lovers alike with wit, insight, and intelligence.
Summary
Aside from love, few actvities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so.
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What listeners say about The Art of Travel
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Thomas
- 21-11-16
Great book... better to read than listen though.
Great book... better to read than listen though. The pace is just a little quick for an audio book.
3 people found this helpful
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- Phoebe
- 29-06-15
Good for room travel
Insightful and beautifully read, with some moments of gentle humour. Sometimes seemed to wander off the topic of travel but always came back to the point eventually - often in a thought-provoking way.
2 people found this helpful
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- Mauro CALO'
- 19-03-19
thought provoking lucid analysis
through his elegant prose, the author analyses the drivers of our usually superficial travel choices and makes us ponder on the deeper motives that move our lives.
1 person found this helpful
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- quiltbrain
- 10-12-17
Hard to read
I m glad I read it because it opened my eyes to traveling with intention, but I can’t say I liked it. I would not have read this except for school. Wouldn’t recommend it either.
3 people found this helpful
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- J. Natael
- 07-08-13
Dull, suggestions for better alternatives
I listened to about forty-five minutes of this book (almost a fifth of it) only to hear several long lists of what various characters ordered in restaurants and a long description of the basis of the opinion that imagination is better than travel. After that I gave up.
If you were drawn in by the title, like I was, I would recommend skipping this actual book and instead going for The Art of Pilgrimage or Vagabonding, either of which delivers much better what this one's title promised than it does.
11 people found this helpful
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- jean
- 05-04-19
A different sort of guide
Travel guides: not the Fodor's or Lonely Planet, but a different perspective: the perspective of poets and writers against the background of what is personal, immediate. I enjoyed listening to this in the audio format.
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- dana
- 25-04-16
a terrible book
if you want to waste your money and time, buy this book. i like alan de botton's speaks and already had seen a lot on youtube. so instead of buying this book and wasting your money and time, go to youtube and see his speaks for free. this book is about everything, but the art of travel.
4 people found this helpful