The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work teems with sharp portraits, interesting details and shrewd commentary... -- The Guardian The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work succeeds as entertainment, if not as analysis, when de Botton allows himself to geek out, as when he flies to the Maldives to follow a tuna's journey to a dinner table in Bristol, traipses after a painter who has devoted years to an oak in East Anglia or rummages through a graveyard of mothballed airplanes in the Mojave Desert. -- The New York Times