Zusatztext A jewel of civility, wit and insight; de Botton has produced wondrous essays. An invitation to hyperbole ... a volume to give one an expansive sense of wonder. The Baltimore Sun Illuminating ... a lovely combination of enthusiasm, sensitivity, a care for the large and small, and the local and the foreign ... reading de Botton's book will help a person discover something fabulous in everyday." Chicago Tribune There is something Proustian in The Art of Travel, in the best sense, for Mr. de Botton is a kind of flaneur , strolling through his subject thoughtfully and offering nuanced truths based on his reading, experience and philosophical temperament. The Wall Street Journal It would be difficult to name a writer as erudite and yet as reader friendly ... With a wry, self-deprecating charm, he passes his enthusiasms along in such manner that you can't help being delighted by them. The Seattle Times [R]efreshing and profoundly readable.... Thanks to de Botton's detailed and thoughtful writing, coupled with his clever curiosity, The Art of Travel has the potential to enrich not only our journeys, but also our lives. The Philadelphia Inquirer [De Botton] relates even the most disappointing experiences with delightful wit, graceful prose and surprising insight. The Los Angeles Times Wickedly funny ... De Botton travels like the rest of us, but he brings with him the amazing erudition, crisp, lovely prose, and entertaining intellect that made How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy such phenomenal successes. The Boston Globe [E]xudes erudition and artfulness.... Delightful. Minneapolis Star-Tribune [A] wonderful book: inventive, witty, intelligent, and beautifully written. At its best, its prose achieves the intensity of aphorism ... provocative and insightful ... teeming with tantalizing detail. The Boston Phoenix Charmingly and capably convinces us how unaware most of us are as we move about in the world ... will leave the reader mentally reaching for a pencil to check off the graceful, witty turns of Mr. de Botton's mind. The Washington Times A thoughtful and anecdote-rich meditation on how trips can alter us in unexpected ways. Elle Magazine An erudite, funny brand of philosophy ... will make you think and laugh and want to plan a trip to test out some of de Botton's ideas for yourself. Atlanta Journal-Constitution [A] quirky, delightful meditation on why we go where we go ... What makes his book so much fun and so utterly unique is the way his mind works as he contemplates his (and our) responses to museums, airports, landscapes, hotelseven to a gas station. Read just a few pages of de Botton and you'll follow him anywhere. O Magazine Quietly terrific ... It says a great deal about his ability that no matter whom he might invoke he does not pale by comparison. The New York Sun De Botton ... gives voice and meaning to the thousands of epiphanies great and small brought about by voyaging. Esquire Alain de Botton piques curiosity not only about where we go but why and howquestions worth considering even if our destination is no farther than the nearest cabana. Vogue Journeys of the de Botton kind ... expand our perspective, they broaden our mind, they enrich the intellect. We travel, this precocious young man reminds us, to find ourselves. The Dallas Morning News Delicious writing ... pure, unalloyed pleasure ... [De Botton's] thoughts are original, startling, and what is more, feel true. The Arizona Republic Utterl...

Autorentext
ALAIN DE BOTTON is the author of On Love, The Romantic Movement, Kiss and Tell, How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy and, most recently, Status Anxiety. His work has been translated into twenty languages. He lives in London.

Klappentext

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 distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a wise and utterly original book. Don't leave home without it.

Zusammenfassung
**A wise and utterly original book of travel essays from an international bestselling author that will “give one an expansive sense of wonder” (The Baltimore Sun).
**
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 distinguished fellow-travelers as Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, who catalogued the wonders of his bedroom. The Art of Travel is a “refreshing and profoundly readable" book (The Philadelphia Inquirer). Don’t leave home without it.

Leseprobe
On Anticipation

It was hard to say when exactly winter arrived. The decline was gradual, like that of a person into old age, inconspicuous from day to day until the season became an established, relentless reality. First came a dip in evening temperatures, then days of continuous rain, confused gusts of Atlantic wind, dampness, the fall of leaves and the changing of the clocks—though there were still occasional moments of reprieve, mornings when one could leave the house without a coat and the sky was cloudless and bright. But they were like false signs of recovery in a patient upon whom death has already passed its sentence. By December the new season was entrenched, and the city was covered almost every day by an ominous steel-grey sky, like one in a painting by Mantegna or Veronese, the perfect backdrop to the crucifixion of Christ or to a day beneath the bedclothes. The neighbourhood park became a desolate spread of mud and water, lit up at night by rain-streaked street lamps. Passing it one evening during a downpour, I recalled how, in the intense heat of the previous summer, I had stretched out on the ground and let my bare feet slip out of my shoes to caress the grass, and how this direct contact with the earth had brought with it a sense of freedom and expansiveness, summer breaking down the usual boundaries between indoors and out and allowing me to feel as much at home in the world as in my own bedroom.

But now the park was foreign once more, the grass a forbidding arena in the incessant rain. Any sadness I might have felt, any suspicion that happiness or understanding was unattainable, seemed to find ready encouragement in the sodden dark-red brick buildings and low skies tinged orange by the city's streetlights.

Such climatic circumstances, together with a sequence of events that occurred at around this time (and seemed to confirm Chamfort's dictum that a man must swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead), conspired to render me intensely susceptible to the unsolicited arrival one late afternoon of a large, brightly illustrated brochure entitled 'Winter Sun'. Its cover displayed a row of palm trees, many of them growing at an angle, on a sandy beach fringed by a turquoise sea, set against a backdrop of hills where I imagined there to be waterfa…