The Art of Travel
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Product Description
Aside from like, 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 appealing 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. In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton, leader of How Proust Can Change Your Life, explores what the point of travel might be and modestly suggets how we can learn to be a small more pleased in our travels.
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This book was a tiring read. I struggled to get through it. Only one chapter was remotely appealing and thought provoking. The rest was self serving drivel. If you need a book to place you to sleep on a plane or train, this could be it.
Reader’s 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 leader’s style and motivation.
Reader’s 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 nearly 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 as a replacement for by persons who can soak up the local color, and interact with real people, and be transformed by the experience. This guy could ruin any trip.
Reader’s 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 scenery . our states of mind control how we react to a agreed landscape , whether its the sinai desert or our own bedroom .
i reflect mr de botton would find basic buddhist instruction very helpful . he seems genuinely baffled that he is not able to delight in 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 right.
i would be interested to hear from additional readers who may or may not agree with me.
Reader’s 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 past analyses from additional travelers from heap times and places. His chapter on Van Gogh’s Provence illustrates his approach. He uses correspondence between Vincent and his brother to set up 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 past facts cited by him. He makes a valid point in describing the perception Alexander von Humboldt veteran 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.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5