Amazon.com.au: Alain de Botton: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

The School of Life: An Emotional Education 05/09/2019

$14.99

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Take some time to reflect and refocus this winter, with the essential guide on how to live wisely and well, no matter what challenges the world throws at you - from Alain de Botton, the bestselling author of The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel and The Course of Love

This is a book 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.

This book brings together ten years of essential and transformative research on emotional intelligence, with practical topics including:

- how to understand yourself
- how to master the dilemmas of relationships
- how to become more effective at work
- how to endure failure
- how to grow more serene and resilient

Praise for Alain de Botton:

'What he has managed to do is remarkable: to help us think better so that we may live better lives' Irish Times

'A serious and optimistic set of practical ideas that could improve and alter the way we live' Jeanette Winterson, The Times

'Alain de Botton likes to take big, complex subjects and write about them with thoughtful and deceptive innocence' Observer

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The Course of Love: An unforgettable story of love and marriage from the author of bestselling novel Essays in Love 28/04/2016

by Alain de Botton

( 1,989 )

$14.99

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER

From one of our great thinkers on modern life and the human condition - an unforgettable story of love and marriage from the author of bestselling novel Essays in Love as well as The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life

'The Course of Love probes the very heart of marriage, its shifts and squalls, its great adventure, with such forensic tenderness. I laughed a lot, too' Deborah Moggach

Modern love is never easy. Society is obsessed with stories of romance, but what comes after happily ever after?

This is a love story with a difference. From dating to marriage, from having kids to having affairs, it follows the progress of a single ordinary relationship: tender, messy, hilarious, painful, and entirely un-Romantic. It is a love story for the modern world, chronicling the daily intimacies, the blazing rows, the endless tiny gestures that make up a life shared between two people. Moving and deeply insightful, The Course of Love offers us a window into essential truths about the nature of love.

'Engaging, sympathetic, acutely perceptive... There's a refreshing honesty in what de Botton has to say' Guardian

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How To Think More About Sex: The School of Life 01/06/2012

by Alain de Botton

( 285 )

$12.99

Sex is the most intimately human experience there is. It can also be the most confusing. Our desire to be together conflicts with our desire to avoid vulnerability and appear 'normal', leaving us detached, desensitised or embarrassed. Covering topics including adultery, lust, pornography and impotence, Alain de Botton argues that 21st century sex will always be a balancing act of trust versus risk, and of primal desire versus studied civility. By examining sex from a subjective - rather than scientific - perspective, he uncovers new ideas on how we can achieve that balance. Pulling back the sheets on modern sexuality, 'How To Think More About Sex' offers important and surprising wisdom that proves that being good in bed is really all in your head.

Other Formats:: Paperback

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How to Overcome Your Childhood 19/06/2019

by The School of Life

( 453 )

$8.99

To an extraordinary and even humbling extent, who we are as adults is determined by events that happened to us before our fifteenth birthday. The way we express affection, the sort of people we find appealing, our understanding of success and respectability, our approach to work and money… all have a habit of being decisively shaped by events in childhood. This isn’t to say that we have to remain prisoners of the past; it simply means that in order to liberate ourselves from our histories, we first have to become fully aware of them. This is a book about such a liberation. It acts as a guide to the influence of childhood on our adults selves, as well as to the way we can – through understanding – move on from some of the more unhelpful aspects of our early family dynamics. We learn about the way that character is formed, about the concept of ‘emotional inheritance,’ about the formation of our concepts of being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - and the impact of parental styles of love on the way we choose adult partners. We learn too about how we might evolve emotionally and, in particular, how we may sometimes need to have a breakdown in order to have a breakthrough. The tone throughout is gentle, wry and humane. We are left with a powerful sense that building up an emotionally successful adult life is possible so long as we reflect with sufficient imagination and compassion on what happened to us a long while back.

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How to Get Married 24/04/2018

by The School of Life, Alain de Botton

( 33 )

$11.99

Many of us are attracted to the idea of marriage and yet feel a bit uncomfortable with some of the rituals that are traditionally associated with the big day. Perhaps the old ceremonies place too much emphasis on the supernatural or else seem out of step with some of the complex realities of contemporary relationships. In response to this dilemma, the School of Life has rethought exactly what the ideal wedding day would consist of and redesigned the entire process from scratch for the use of modern couples. The book begins by proposing new ways of getting prepared for a wedding at a psychological level, suggesting how couples should ready themselves for the often tricky journey ahead and how to think through some of the thorniest issues that beset love. The book then presents an entirely practical and thoughtfully redesigned wedding ceremony, from picking out a suitable venue to suggested vows and readings. Finally, the book offers some ideas for how to approach the start of married life. What follows is a bold rethinking of one of humankind’s most important and popular rituals.

Other Formats:: Hardcover

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A Job to Love (The School of Life Library) 09/02/2017

by The School of Life

( 167 )

$11.99

Alongside a satisfying relationship, a career we love is one of the foremost requirements for a fulfilled life. Unfortunately, it is devilishly hard to understand oneself well enough to know quite where one’s energies should be directed. It is to help us out of some of these impasses that we wrote A Job to Love, a guide to how we can better understand ourselves and locate a job that is right for us. With compassion and a deeply practical spirit, the book guides us to discover our true talents and to make sense of our confused desires and aspirations before it is too late.

Other Formats:: Hardcover

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Status Anxiety (NON-FICTION) 13/01/2005

by Alain de Botton

( 338 )

$14.99

THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER

From one of our greatest voices in modern philosophy, author of The Course of Love, The Consolations of Philosophy, Religion for Atheists and The School of Life - Alain de Botton sets out to understand our universal fear of failure - and how we might change it

'De Botton's gift is to prompt us to think about how we live and how we might change things' The Times

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.

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. The result is a book that is not only entertaining and thought-provoking - but genuinely wise and helpful as well.

'He analyses modern society with great charm, learning and humour. His remedies come as a welcome relief when most books offering solutions to the stresses of life recommend the lotus position' Daily Mail

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How to Find the Right Words: A guide to delivering life's most awkward messages 04/02/2021

by The School of Life

( 76 )

$8.99

Life constantly requires us to give other people some hugely awkward messages: that we don’t love them anymore; that we do love them (though we’re not meant to); that they smell a bit; that they’re fired; that we’re furious with them (though we adore them); or that their music is too loud... Often, out of embarrassment, we just stay quiet. Occasionally we explode. And, typically, we stumble about, looking for the right words – dreading that we didn’t find them and thereby causing more hurt than we should. This is a book to help us locate the best possible words to get across a range of life’s most difficult messages. In 20 case studies drawn from relationships, friendships, work, our families and interactions with strangers we are gently shown what we might – in an ideal world – find ourselves saying to make our intentions known while causing minimal harm. We laugh, we recognise our troubles – and we’re introduced to a range of deeply empathetic ways to navigate some of our most acute social dilemmas.

Other Formats:: Hardcover

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A More Exciting Life: A guide to greater freedom, spontaneity and enjoyment 26/11/2020

by The School of Life

( 84 )

$11.99

One of the things we all deeply crave, and all richly deserve, is a more exciting life. We know well enough that many things have to be routine, hard and a little bit boring. But we also rightly sense that, if only we can find a way, our lives could be rendered intermittently more joyful, intense, thrilling and beautiful. This is a guide to the more exciting life we know could be ours. It isn’t about the outward things we might do: travel, parachute out of airplanes or learn a foreign language. This is a book of psychology and about how we can nurture a sense of inner liberation, accept our desires and aspirations and then have the courage to set ourselves free. Perhaps for too long we have resigned ourselves to things that aren’t fair or necessary, we have felt too constricted (and perhaps unloved) to communicate well with others and the proper expansion of our characters has been sacrificed for the sake of compliance. Now is a chance to recover some of our spirit, and to become open to the full intensity, beauty and mystery of life and to the richness of our own possibilities. Here is a guide to that more exciting life we know should – and can – be ours.

Other Formats:: Hardcover

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The Good Enough Parent: How to raise contented, interesting and resilient children 09/09/2021

by The School of Life

( 45 )

$11.99

Bringing up a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life’s great challenges. It is also, fortunately,
not a matter of luck.

The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of life lessons, including how to say ‘no’ to a child you adore, how to look beneath the surface of ‘bad’ behaviour to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence.

Most importantly, this is a book that knows that perfection is not required – and could indeed be dangerous, because a key job of any parent is to induct a child gently into the imperfect nature of everything. Written in a tone that is encouraging, wry and soaked in years of experience, The Good Enough Parent is an intelligent guide to raising a child who will one day look back on their childhood with just the right mixture of gratitude, humour and love.

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The Consolations of Philosophy 01/03/2001

by Alain de Botton

( 700 )

$14.99

The Consolations of Philosophy is Alain de Botton's internationally bestselling guide to life

The inspiration for the TV series Philsophy: A Guide to Happiness

Alain de Botton, bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, has set six of the finest minds in the history of philosophy to work on the problems of everyday life. Here then are Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietsche on some of the things that bother us all: lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety; the fear of failure and the pressure to conform.

Alain de Botton was born in 1969 and is the author of non-fiction essays on themes ranging from love and travel to architecture and philosophy. His bestselling books include Essays in Love; The Romantic Movement; Kiss and Tell; Status Anxiety; How Proust Can Change Your Life; The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work; The Art of Travel; The Architecture of Happiness and Religion for Atheists. He lives in London and founded The School of Life and Living Architecture .

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How to Travel 19/12/2018

by The School of Life

( 66 )

$8.99

Going travelling is one of the few things we undertake in a direct attempt to make ourselves happy - and frequently, in fascinating ways, we fail. We get bored, cross, anxious or lonely. It isn't surprising our societies act as if going travelling were simple, just a case of handing over the right sum of money. But a satisfying journey isn't something we can simply buy: it's the result of an art that has to be learnt. This is the guide: not to any one destination but to travel in general. It talks to us, among other things, about how we should choose a place to go, what we might do when we get there, how we should make good moment stick in our minds and why hotel rooms can be such liberating places... In a succession of genial essays, we become students of an unexpected but vital topic: how to understand and more fully enjoy (what should be) some of the finest experiences of our lives. Included amongst these are a number of quizzes and practical exercises to help us reflect on what we have learnt, as well as room for recording our own thoughts and observations of wherever we find ourselves.

Other Formats:: Paperback

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